"Now I understand. It is then imperative that I assume another form?"
"Right. Another form. And could you let me off when you land in ... Where are you headed, anyway?"
"I am going to a place called Rye, New York."
"Never heard of it."
"I am following a radio signal. I have been following it ever since I was exiled into space years ago. The transmitter is attached to the enemy I mentioned earlier. His name is Remo. Perhaps you know him?"
"Never heard of him."
"The one called Remo is powerful enough to destroy me. He is often accompanied by an older meat machine, who is called Chiun. Both are dangerous. Both must die. Their deaths will ensure my survival because when they are dead I will be the most powerful thinking machine on this planet. Do you not agree?"
"Heartily," said Earl Armalide, watching the walls apprehensively. They had stopped with just enough room on all four sides for him to sit up. One of his rifles, lying on the floor, had been bent at the barrel, the carefully oiled mahogany stock split into wood chips.
Radar contact with the shuttle Yuri Gagarin was lost over Long Island Sound.
"What happened?" demanded Colonel Jack Dellingsworth Rader of the civilian controller.
"It went off the screen, sir. It just dropped out."
"Into the water?"
"No, I think it went down over land. But there's no airport in that area. It must have crashed."
"We'll get my crisis team to the crash site."
The NORAD crisis team found no trace of the wreckage of the Soviet shuttle.
Helicopters circled an area ten miles in diameter around the city of Port Chester, New York. By this time, it was dark and the helicopters swept the ground with searchlights. The National Guard, kicked out of the picture during the initial crisis at Kennedy Airport, joined the search. National Guard vehicles lumbered up and down every road and highway in the search area, finding nothing, but harrassing Air Force personnel at every opportunity.
By dawn, every square foot of the search area had been covered without turning up so much as a single heat-resistant ceramic tile off the shuttle's skin.
By the following afternoon, the land search was called off and the Coast Guard was brought in. Divers were dropped from rescue helicopters into the cold waters of Long Island Sound, on the theory that if the shuttle could not be found within the land portion of the search area, it must therefore have gone down in the water-the air-traffic controller at Kennedy notwithstanding. But no trace of the Yurt Gagarin was found in Long Island's waters, either. It had utterly vanished.
Chapter 7
Dr. Harold W. Smith was fascinated by the fact that the Soviet shuttle Yuri Gagarin had apparently come down not far from Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.
The news sent him reaching for the bottom-righthand desk drawer, where he kept his emergency supplies. These consisted of a six-month supply of Maalox for his ulcer and an equal quantity of Alka-Seltzer for the times his ulcer was quiescent.
Smith hesitated, his gray eyes switching nervously from one supply to the other. He took a bottle of each and hurriedly filled a paper cup of spring water from the office dispenser.
Smith dropped two tablets into the water and waited for them to fizz. He brought the bubbling brew to his lips, barely tasting its sterile tang. His stomach heaved once. He put the cup down and reached for the Maalox. He opened the tamper-proof cap and, without benefit of paper cup, drank a third of the white plastic bottle's chalky contents.
When the familiar soothing sensation had sunk into his stomach, Smith relaxed slightly. Then his stomach jumped again.
Smith downed another Alka-Seltzer greedily.
He settled back into his cracked leather chair. The morning light beat through the big picture window of his office at the edge of Long Island Sound.
Smith turned to the window. Somewhere under those dancing waves, according to the latest news reports, the Yuri Gagarin lay in a watery grave. If that were true, there would be no problem.
But Smith did not think it was true. In fact, he had excellent reason to suspect that the shuttle had not crashed at all. His computers had told him so.
Harold Smith was director of Folcroft Sanitarium. But Folcroft Sanitarium was not what it was supposed to be. Ostensibly an institution for the mentally impaired, it was in fact a cover for CURE, America's ultrasecret bulwark against threats to national security.
Smith, a spare man with a tart face and a disposition two degrees to the bad side of Ebenezer Scrooge, had run CURE since it was created in the early sixties. He had grown old manning the CURE information-gathering computers through the days when CURE had a former cop named Remo Williams for an enforcement arm.
But then CURE's contract with Chiun, the aged Master of Sinanju, had finally expired and, in return for Chiun's help in a major crisis with the Russians, Smith had reported to the President that Remo had been eliminated-leaving CURE operating without an enforcement arm. It was great while it lasted.
Then the Master of Sinanju had reappeared. Because of a technicality in his contract, Chiun had insisted that he owed CURE another year's service, and Smith had reluctantly agreed. Soon after, Remo had arrived, having followed his mentor back from Korea, and the two of them had helped Smith defeat an enemy from his OSS past.
Six months had passed. Six quiet months. Smith had settled back into the calm routine of running Folcroft with one hand and managing CURE's data-gathering functions with the other. The Master of Sinanju had taken up residence in Folcroft, along with an unhappy Remo, until the year of service was over.
Dr. Harold W. Smith had begun to entertain the hope of things staying relatively quiet until Remo and Chiun finally returned to Sinanju forever. But the penetration of United States airspace by the Soviet space shuttle had dashed his rising hopes.
When the Gagarin landed peacefully at Kennedy Airport, the problem looked like an Air Force matter. But when the shuttle lifted off again, Smith had hunkered down behind his desktop computer terminal, tapping the main CIA and Defense Intelligence computers. When he tapped into the report that the shuttle had gone down not far from Rye and Folcroft, Smith's nervous stomach had gone into convulsions.
The Gagarin's strange behavior was one thing. Its landing near Rye was more worrisome. Only four people were supposed to know of CURE's existence. Smith was one. The President was another. Remo and Chiun, its former and present enforcement arms, were the others.
But there was one other person who did know about CURE-a Soviet agent. She had worked with Remo on two past missions. The first time was when a renegade Russian parapsychologist had come to America. Smith had met her on that occasion. He respected her. He thought he could trust her.
That didn't stop him from ordering Remo Williams to eliminate her as a potential security threat to CURE. Remo had refused. Partly because Remo, too, respected the woman. But mostly, Smith believe, because he had slept with her.
Smith grudgingly allowed Anna Chutesov to live. It had been a wise decision because she had been instrumental in quelling a second crisis involving a worldwide outbreak of brushfire wars. She had even visited CURE's sanctum sanctorum, Folcroft, at the conclusion of that mission. Smith had had deeper misgivings, and again suggested to Remo that she had to be dealt with. Again Remo had refused. He and the Russian woman had disappeared for several weeks. When Remo finally returned, flushed with more pleasure than Smith had ever seen in him, Remo informed him that Anna had definitely been taken care of.
"You liquidated her?" Smith had asked.
"Actually, she was more like jelly than liquid when I saw her last," Remo said with a smirk.