"For you," Lustbaden spat. "For your country, using its wealth and power to ruin the greatest civilization in history. For the Russians, who helped you to defeat us."
He twisted inside the ear again. Smith lurched, turned his head, and vomited.
"Adolph Hitler nearly saved the world from the scum you defended," Lustbaden screeched, the vapid blue eyes ablaze with passion. "You destroyed it. You and the Soviet Union. You are the murderers, not me. You killed the possibility of a perfect world."
He drew back his hand and slashed Smith across the face with the instrument.
"But the Reich is stronger than you think," he said, inches from Smith's face. "We are everywhere, in every country. Do you know why I stole your precious F-24? Because when your president meets the Soviet premier, it will be your F-24 that smashes into the World Trade Center, killing them. Their end. And from it, a new beginning. We will join forces again, all of us kept alive through the years by SPIDER, and we will march into your two killer nations, sweeping your people away like the garbage they are."
The pain in his ear faded away as Smith thought of the secret American plane, evading its own radar defenses, and then blowing up the World Trade Center building. And it would work. No one could stop Lustbaden now. Then he felt salt being packed into the cut on his face, and he screamed. He did not know if he fainted.
Lustbaden droned on, but Smith no longer heard him. Instead, behind his closed eyes, he saw Vermont in September, crackling with dry leaves whipped by the crisp wind, the air redolent with the fragrance of running sap, the high horsetail clouds signaling the winter to come.
He saw his wife, once again as delicate and pink-cheeked and proud as she was when she presented him with their daughter. The most beautiful child in the world, he'd thought back then, astonished that such a perfect creature could have come from him.
He thought of snow and cedarwood fires and the cloying taste of his wife's inedible fudge and his daughter's face the first time she wore makeup. He'd made her take it off, telling her it was unseemly and ridiculous. She'd cried, but did as he insisted. Only much later did Smith admit to himself that Beth had looked rather attractive.
Oh, to have a plate full of Irma's terrible fudge. Oh, for a chance to tell Beth how pretty she was.
He heard a click and opened his eyes. Lustbaden was gone. He breathed shallowly to lessen the throbbing pains in his ear and his face.
The spectre of CURE loomed inside him. It would all be gone soon, the computers' selfdestruct mechanism activated by the president's voiced command once Smith's death was confirmed. CURE was airtight.
One night there would be a fire in the executive offices of Folcroft Sanitarium, contained by the solid asbestos lining in the walls and in the computer room, and the next day there would be no secret organization to fight crime in America. No one would know that CURE had ever existed, except for the President. And Remo and Chiun— if they lived.
That was another matter. Chiun was supposed to kill Remo in the event of CURE's destruction, but Smith knew better than to believe that would happen. If they survived Lustbaden, Chiun would be all right. He would go back to his Korean village and live out his life writing poetry and telling stories to children.
But Remo. Where did a young man with a body like a machine and no official existence go? Would he become a mercenary, marching in some foreign army to fight whomever he was told for no reason other than a regular paycheck? Would he join a circus or a carnival sideshow, demonstrating his freakish strength for giggling schoolgirls?
Or would Remo just drift like a lost helium balloon, coming to rest in the cobwebs of dusty alleys with the rest of the world's misfit, castoff inhabitants?
Remo. On the day of judgment, Remo Williams would be cited as Smith's greatest sin. He had been chosen almost at random to become CURE's enforcement arm, this young man with no appetite for killing, whose only wish was to live the normal life of a normal man.
CURE, through Smith, had rendered that simple wish impossible. It had stripped away his identity, his past, his dreams. It had been for the best possible cause. Still, Remo would never be normal again.
Is it right, Smith wondered, to change a man's destiny?
His thoughts made his head pound with the thrust of a thousand poisoned spikes. A fever was already setting in, and his sweat ran cold. The blood and vomit in his mouth tasted foul.
His left ear was probably gone for good. What would be next— his eyes? His limbs?
Oh, Beth. Oh, Remo.
So many regrets. It was the curse of middle-age, Smith supposed, to be old enough to have accumlated all of the questions of one's lifetime, and still too young to know any of the answers.
But there was so little time for regret now.
And so much pain.
With a great effort, Smith closed his eyes again and remembered Vermont. In September.
?Chapter Fifteen
"A fine mess you've got us in now," Chiun said.
"If you can't be part of the solution," Remo said, "don't be part of the problem." He was on his hands and knees at the back wall of the cave, digging and probing with his fingers, trying to find a weak spot in the stone.
"My only part in this problem was ever having anything to do with you," Chuin said. "But my ancestors have punished me. Here I am, perhaps doomed to spend the rest of my life in a cage. With you. Watching you burrow in the ground like a mole."
"Quiet," barked one of the guards on the other side of the electrified fence.
Chiun responded with a babble of Korean.
Remo had found a small opening in the wall near the floor and, working quietly with his hand, chipped away some of the rock. He lay down, his face close to the rock floor of the cave, and looked inside the small hole he had made.
His pupils, already adjusted to nearly pitch-darkness, opened even wider to take in the greenish luminosity of the slime covering every inch of the tiny passageway.
Two dots of light, tinged with red, glowed briefly in the darkness. As Remo reached toward them, they disappeared with a scratching, scuffling sound.
He struck out his hand blindly and grabbed onto something warm and twitching that shrieked in the blackness.
A rat.
With a shiver of disgust he threw it away and heard it hit with a thud and a crackle of small bones.
Then he saw the lights again, redder this time, it seemed. But the two dots were joined by two others, and then four, and then hundreds more, piled behind and on top of one another, and they were coming closer, coming toward him. The opening behind the wall was not big enough for a man; only big enough for rats. Dozens of rats.
He recoiled. He had nothing to fight them with but his hands and his face.
He slapped at the ground, hoping to find a weapon. Anything— a hefty rock, a sliver of discarded wire from the mesh fence...
There was nothing. Only the slime-caked walls narrowing into obscurity and the menacing red eyes stalking closer. Suddenly, two rats darted toward him.
Remo drew his body back, away from the small hole he had made as the rats scurried by. Then, forcing every bit of strength he possessed into his hands, he slammed them against the cave wall.
The rock shuddered, chipped, and then bits of it tumbled down to close the hole. He hit the walls again, and the hole was filled over. Inside it, Remo could hear the squeaking of the rats, returned again to the darkness.
He stood up and walked back toward Chiun, wiping his hands on his black chino pants. The two rats that had fled around him now twitched, crusty and blackened, on the electric grating. As Remo looked past them into the Great Hall, the dim criss-cross pattern of light falling through the mesh netting dappled his face.