One of the four spoke. His eyes, encircled by black grease, were the palest blue, their shape narrow and serpentine. Caan recognized the voice as belonging to his visitor of the night before.
"Get in the plane," he said.
?Chapter Two
His name was Remo, and he was swimming underwater at twenty knots, slackening off his top speed to keep pace with a school of dolphins that had temporarily adopted him.
Curious about their new playmate, they nosed him gently and chattered in a supersonic chorus as he dipped and rolled with them, dived deep and shot up for air.
It was getting dark. His excercise period was over, but he was enjoying himself with the clownish bottle noses, and besides, nothing was waiting for him back in Key West except for Chiun, who would be watching television anyway.
Reluctantly, he left the dolphins and headed back in the general direction of land. That was the basic trouble with being an assassin, he thought, as he came up for air near the beginning of Seven Mile Bridge, the only overland route into Key West. He was stuck with fish. There weren't many people for a professional killer to relate to.
There was Chiun, of course, his trainer and teacher. Chiun was the Master of Sinanju, the greatest assassin alive, but he was still an eighty-year-old man whose principal interests ran toward ancient Korean poetry, reruns of 1965 soap operas, and a terrorist Oriental news anchorwoman named Cheeta Ching. And killing people. Not exactly your scintillating after-dinner conversationalist.
Using as markers the long steel poles rooting the bridge to the ocean floor, Remo dived and swam underwater for the next half-mile. Up for air, watching the cars overhead breezing into the country's southernmost land mass, back under for another half-mile. After ten minutes he was on land, running down Roosevelt Boulevard, past the acres of shopping complexes and fast-food eateries known collectively as "New Key West," waving occasionally to honking cars filled with pretty girls, and turned onto Truman Avenue into the old town, Cayo Hueso, as the Spaniards first called it, with its winding tropical streets and warm kitchen smells tinged with Cuban coffee and the pungent sweetness of crawfish.
He was feeling better. His last assignment from upstairs had not gone smoothly. More lives had been lost than he'd counted on, and he had had to travel halfway around the world with an injury to his nervous system that had nearly killed him. After it was over, Remo never wanted to work again. But now, in the fragrant Florida sunlight, surrounded by an explosion of orchids and hibiscus and frangipani, he was growing stronger.
"Let's see, let's see," he mumbled as he continued to enumerate the human beings he was close to. "Chiun," he said, holding up one finger. "And..." He scoured his mind.
Parents couldn't count, because Remo didn't have parents, and the nuns at the orphanage where he was raised didn't count either, since he never got to know many of them well, and those who knew him did not like him. The cops at the precinct in Newark couldn't count because he was still a rookie on the force when he got bleeped out of official existence, framed for a crime he didn't commit and sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work. Only everyone thought it did work, and that Remo had died in it, because it had been set up that way by the sneakiest, coldest, least human individual in America...
Remo held up a second finger. "Smith," he said disgustedly.
Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, was Remo's second and only other link to the rest of humankind.
Folcroft was Smiths cover for what he really did, which was to employ Remo as the enforcement arm of an organization called CURE. It was a secret organization, an extra legal offshoot of the president's office. CURE's job was to control crime by functioning outside the Constitution.
Sometimes Smith worked alone, pulling out information from the giant computer banks built into Folcroft and getting that information to the right people through thousands of innocuous channels— clerks who thought they were informing for the FBI, government workers who thought it was the CIA who was sending them small but helpful checks each month, reporters who thought they had a hush-hush link with the Treasury Department.
But Smith didn't always work alone. Sometimes— when somebody needed to be bumped off, to be precise— Remo worked for him.
That was the depressing part. As if killing people wasn't bad enough, Remo had to kill people for the dullest, driest, most extraordinarily boring and humorless man on the globe.
Smith had sent him to Key West three days before, to "await further instructions," as the lemon-faced New Englander had put it. Smith always talked as if he were writing memos. "Awaiting further instructions," of course, meant that Remo was going to have to cream someone pretty soon.
What a way to make a living, he thought as he sprinted past the chic boutiques on Duvall Street, past the Bull and Whistle, where the area's tough guys strutted, past the throbbing discos, where too-pretty boys displayed their wares with studied decadence to moneyed old men. The carnival midway of Old Key West was already in full swing, beckoning with its lights and music and tropical sea breezes to sailors, lovers, Caribbean blacks, college kids, local shrimpers, and sponge fishermen.
Remo went on the Mallory Dock, where the tourists had long since finished applauding the nightly sunset as if it were a Broadway production. Near the dock was Chiun's and Remo's temporary home, a quiet little Conch house, built indestructibly by local craftsmen, or "conches," and surrounded by the wild orange blossoms of massive poinciana trees.
"I'm home, Chiun," Remo said.
The frail old Oriental with tufts of white, wispy hair in patches on his head and chin sat on a mat on the floor, his almond eyes transfixed on the television, where the lizard-eyed, venom-tongued Cheeta Ching spewed out the day's misdeeds with spiteful relish.
"A naval aircraft carrier bearing the mangled bodies of 213 dead crew members, undoubtedly the victims of yet another U.S. government plot against its oppressed people, has been discovered off the coast of Florida," the newscaster said. On the wall above the television hung a color photograph of the same woman, encased in an ornate gilt frame. "More details of the Navy Death Ship tonight at eleven. Till then, this is Cheeta Ching, the voice of truth."
"Hi," Remo said, trying again for the old man's attention.
Chiun ignored him.
"It's a nice night. I thought maybe we'd go into town, look things over. We could have a good time."
"Silence, brainless one," Chiun said, still staring fixedly at the television.
Remo sighed. It occurred to him that if he had known he was going to have to spend his life with only two people, and one of them was going to be an eighty-year-old Korean assassin and the other was going to be Harold W. Smith, he would have stayed on at the orphanage.
* * *
A thousand miles away, in Washington, D.C., a score of top U.S. government officials sat in darkness as they watched slides depicting the gory aftermath of the massacre aboard the U.S.S. Andrew Jackson.
"This is typical of the sort of damage inflicted," said a uniformed officer who had been introduced as a forensic scientist. He waved a pointer over a slide showing a man with no eyes and a gaping hole in the middle of his neck. "Can we have a closeup of this, please?" he asked politely.
The projector clicked, and the festering neck wound sprang into bloody detail. Somebody swore softly.
"Of course, these bodies weren't found until some three days after the deaths occurred, so a certain amount of decomposition had set in. Still, you see the general idea. Next."
The following slide showed the deck of the ship, littered with slaughtered bodies and tinged with the rusty-brown remains of a sea of blood.