Remo stepped around an incoming .357 sniper round that would have disemboweled him. The bullet chopped a hole in the pavement and sent concrete shards raining against the armored podium that protected the senator from California.
"The long-range boomer must be eradicated first," Chiun declared. "Draw his fire."
Chiun vanished as the next sniper shot passed through the spot where his body had been, continuing into the building facade.
Missed one old S.O.B. and tagged another, Remo thought as he retreated, maneuvering away from the screaming crowds who had the good sense to panic and flee. The Secret Service agents were also taking cover in flocks. Orders were shouted. Agents started moving out. They could not have been less relevant to the goings-on.
Remo dodged more rounds, trying to look lucky instead of deliberate, but the man who was coordinating the attack knew something was going on. Remo was trapped where he was. He had to keep the sniper's attention until Chiun neutralized him, but he wouldn't want to lose the one doing the supervising.
The man in the equipment booth bolted, knocking a pair of cowering equipment operators into their equipment. Dammit, where was Chiun?
Remo's gaze shifted back to the nearby rooftop where the sniper crouched. A rainbow of gold swept across the roof and pounced on the gunman's position, then Chiun stood and waved. The gunner was history. The crowd could now panic in peace, without risk of taking sniper rounds.
Remo ran fast, vaulting over a concrete barricade and glimpsing the fleeing man, but the electronics booth blew apart before he touched down. He felt it coming and rolled, exhaling, absorbing the blast as it rolled overhead, then springing to his feet again. A glance showed him four or five bodies in the booth, but the real goal of the explosive was to ensure no further transmissions came from this place.
Remo Williams was sick and tired of it all. Perception and promotion and how leaders were marketed to the gullible masses. What sort of a sick bunch of idiots allowed their nation to roll on the rails of advertising in lieu of common sense? What had they come to when it was okay to blow up a handful of people to keep the wrong fucking commercial off the fucking television?
"You!"
He had his victim by the arm before the man even knew it, and Remo stopped. The man kept running and almost tore his own arm out by the socket.
"Let go of me!" General Rubin cried.
"I hate television," Remo told him.
"What?"
"Commercials and propaganda and promotions and sound bites and all that crap. I hate it!"
"Fine! Let go of me!"
Remo removed the 9 mm handgun from his victim's hand and squeezed the muzzle closed before dropping it. "I don't care if it's the nightly news. I don't care if it's the Exciting Tomatoes. It's all the same bullshit."
The man found his combat knife, finally, and tried to cut off the wrist of the hand, like an iron vise, that held him. Remo took the knife away, snapped it, dropped it. "Magazines, too. Billboards. Whatever. It's all crap and so are you."
"I'm not in marketing!" Rubin promised.
"Sure, you are. You just killed five innocent men, just to keep the competitor's commercial from going on the boob tube. You know what that makes you?"
"I'm just a soldier. Okay, I'm a murderer! Arrest me!"
"You're worse than a murderer," Remo told him, a
savage grimace on his face, a deadly cold in his eyes. "You are an advertising executive."
"I'm not!"
"Do you know what I do to advertising executives?" "I don't know and I don't want to know!" "But I want to show you."
Remo showed General Rubin exactly what he did to advertising executives.
37
"Hi, Smitty. Where's this guy Orville Flicker at right now?"
"Why do you ask?" Smith asked.
"I'm going to go kill him."
"We can't kill him. It will make him a martyr. We need to put an end to this movement entirely."
"You said that before. Now he's gone and wiped out a bunch more innocent people. Just some dopey techies standing around fiddling with their electronics. How many more people have got to get killed before it's enough?"
"Remo, Flicker may be just the tip of the iceberg. What if there are five more men capable of organizing the White Hand?"
"I'll kill them, too."
"Eventually, but first you'll have strengthened MAEBE by turning Flicker into a saint. The White Hand's activities will be further legitimized."
"Then what, Smitty? What do we do?"
"We're fighting back."
"Yeah, and a lot of good it's doing."
"Not you and Chiun," Smith said calmly. "Mark and I are playing the MAEBE game."
Remo frowned at Chiun, who was standing outside the phone booth watching the dirty wisps of smoke drifting up from the blast site in front of the Old Senate Office Building, three miles away from where they stood. Chiun shrugged in answer to the unasked question.
"We don't get it," Remo said.
"We're countermarketing," Smith said. "We're creating negative publicity for MAEBE. We're tarnishing their halos."
"You gonna save lives using press releases? I don't think so."
"Remo, I need you to understand what MAEBE is— a house of cards propped up on an image of purity. The public thinks MAEBE is squeaky clean while all around is corruption and unethical behavior. Do you see?"
"No."
"Their popularity skyrocketed in days, but if the public perception is ruined, then their popularity will fall just as fast. Think of MAEBE is a one-legged stool. We're starting to chip away at the leg, and we don't have to cut deep before it will collapse under its own weight."
Remo hung up, irritably. Plastic chips scattered at his feet.
"Another phone assassinated by Remo, Destroyer of Public Utility Property."
"Shut up, Chiun." Remo marched into the street.
"Where are you off to?" Chiun asked, irked at having to catch up. Catching up was undignified.
Remo nodded at the Circuit City store in the nearby strip mall. "Going to watch some TV."
Dunklin County, Missouri
Georgette Redstone looked at the printout. "It's a wire transfer."
"It's for ten grand," said her advertising manager.
"Is it legit?" Redstone asked.
"Yeah, I called First National. The money's in our account right now. They want us to start running it as soon as possible. You want to see the commercial?"
Georgette Redstone nodded. "This is too good to be true. Is it a white-power group or something?"
"It's a negative ad, for sure, but nothing out of bounds," said her ad manager. "Nothing we can't air."
Georgette knew her ad manager well enough to take his assessment with a grain of salt. The man would do anything to sell commercial time.
The wire transfer had come unexpectedly. In fact, nobody at the tiny rural television station had known about their good fortune until an e-mail arrived ordering the advertising time and asking the station to download the video from a remote server.
The commercial certainly wasn't well produced. The narrator sounded digitized and cold. The graphics were second-rate. What Georgette Redstone found most intriguing about the ad was its subject matter.
"It's a negative ad about MAEBE?" she asked when it ended.
"Why not?" asked her advertising manager.
"I never heard anybody say anything bad about them before, that's all."
"George, it's ten grand for five one-minute spots," her ad sales manager said. "That's four times our rate. We can't turn this down."
Georgette shrugged. "Who's turning it down? Go run it."