"Oh, yeah," she said brightly to Remo. "Now I remember what I was supposed to tell you." She held her glass up over her head, letting the last drops roll into her mouth.
"What was that?" Remo said.
"I remember now," she said. "The dead animals are next."
Chiun turned slowly in his seat.
"I know that," Remo said. "Who told you to tell me?"
She rubbed her fingers together in the shame-shame gesture. "I'm not telling, I'm not telling, I'm not telling," John Hacker said, and then the revolutionary priestess smiled once, rolled her eyes back in her head and collapsed face forward on the table, unconscious.
Remo looked at her, then at Chiun, who stared at the drunken girl, shaking his head.
"There we are, Chiun, those dead animals again. Are you going to tell me what it's all about?"
"It will not matter," Chiun said. He looked at Joan again and shook him head. "She is very young to die," he said.
"Everyone is very young to die," Remo said.
"Yes," Chiun said. "That is true. Even you."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Remo sensed the tail after he and Chiun had gone about two blocks from The Bard where Joan Hacker, high priestess of the impending revolution, slept on a table, the result of three Singapore Slings in fifteen minutes.
Remo motioned Chiun to stand with him and look into the window of a souvenir shop.
"Why am I forced to feign interest in all this Chinese shlock?" Chiun asked, using another of the Yiddish words he had learned on vacation a few years before.
"Quiet. We're being followed."
"Oh, my goodness," Chiun mocked. "By whom? Should I run? Should I scream for the police?"
"By that guy back there in the blue suit," Remo said. "Don't look now."
"Oh, my, Remo, you are wonderful. First for discovering him, and then for instructing me not to alert him that we have discovered him. How lucky I am to be allowed to accompany you." Chiun began to babble then, streams of Korean words, punctuated by an occasional in-English "how wonderful" or "how lucky I am."
Finally, it all dawned on Remo and he said sheepishly: "I guess you spotted him, too."
"The Master cannot lie," Chiun said. "I absorbed his vibrations. And also those of the other man who waits for us farther down the street and has been keeping one-half block ahead of us since we left that opium den."
"Where?" Remo said.
"Don't look now," China said, giggling. "Oh, how lucky I am to be with you. Oh, how wonderful you are. Oh, how grand. Oh, how..."
"All right, Chiun, knock it off, will you? Anybody can make a mistake."
Chiun turned immediately serious. "But not one who presumes to challenge the dead animals. For him, any mistake will be his last. You are lucky again, however; these men are not the agents of the legend. You have nothing to fear."
That relieved the threat, but it did not answer the question: who were the men and why were they following Remo and Chiun?
The two men continued their tail, one behind and one ahead, as Remo and Chiun strolled casually back to their apartment, and Remo explained what the terrorists had planned for tomorrow. Teterboro was a small private airport in New Jersey, but probably one of the busiest airports in the world. Planes took off and landed every thirty or forty seconds. Seizing the control tower and giving conflicting traffic directions to different planes might touch off a chain reaction of accidents that could cost lives and create chaos,
And planes that would be frightened away by the accidents would probably wander into Newark Airport or Kennedy or LaGuardia, where their potential for accidental destruction would be fantastic, considering the big jet jobs coming in and out all the time.
"Why is it," Remo asked, "that no matter what terrorists are for, they always wind up killing people?"
Chiun shrugged unconcernedly. "It is a nothing."
"Dozens could die," Remo said heatedly.
"No," Chiun insisted. "There is an old Korean proverb. When two dogs attack, one barks but the other bites. Why do you spend your life worrying about barking dogs?"
"Yeah? Well, there's an old American proverb too," Remo said.
"I'm sure you will tell me of it."
"I will," Remo said, but did not since he was not able to think of one right offhand.
They continued walking in silence and in the middle of the next block, Remo said brightly:
"How about 'a stitch in time saves nine'?"
"I prefer 'haste makes waste,' " Chiun said.
"How about 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure'?" Remo offered.
"I prefer 'fools rush in where angels fear to tread,'" Chiun said.
"How about rice for supper tonight?" said Remo, restraining his impulse to strangle Chiun.
"Rice is nice," Chiun said sweetly, "but I prefer duck."
When they reached their apartment building, Remo sent Chiun upstairs with cautionary words not to kill either of the men who might try to follow him. Then Remo went around the corner, dallied long enough to be sure the tail had picked him up, and ducked into a dark cocktail lounge. He stood alongside the cigarette machine in the dimly illuminated foyer and waited. Seconds later, one of the tails came through the door. It was the one in the blue suit; the one who had trailed them from behind.
He blinked, trying to accustom him sun-shrunk eyes to the darkness, and Remo reached out and dug his right fingers into the man's left forearm.
"All right, pal," Remo said "Who are you?"
The man looked up at Remo, his face a picture of innocence under him soft-brimmed felt hat, his body soft under him blue suit, and Remo knew. With a sinking feeling in the pit of him stomach, he knew where the man had come from.
The man inhaled. "Maher. IRS," he said. "If you let go of my arm, I'll show you my identification."
"That's all right," Remo said. "Why are you following me?". He squeezed the arm again to guarantee truth.
The man winced. "Don't know. Office assignment. Find out where you were going. Big deal. Mr. F.G. Maher. A field assignment, when all I am is an analyst."
"And your partner out there? Who's he?" Remo asked.
"That's Kirk. He's in my office."
"All right," Remo said, releasing the man. "Why not just go back and file your report that we went to the apartment building and that was that? We're not going out tonight. I promise you, so you can go home."
"Suits me," Maher said. "Tonight's the night Carolynn makes spaghetti and sausage."
"If you say one more word," Remo said, remembering the long-ago taste of it, "I'll kill you. Go away now."
Maher turned and left. Remo waited a few minutes and then went out onto the street and headed back toward him apartment building. Up ahead, he saw Maher and his partner walking away from the building.
Goddam that Smith. The two men were obviously CURE agents. Just two more faceless dummies in the nationwide network of information-gathering that Smith had set up. Two more men who filed reports without any knowledge of to whom they really went.
Smith couldn't wait again. He was blundering around, sending in men, getting in Remo's way.
Remo got upstairs, picked up the telephone and dialled the 800 area-code number that rang on Smith's desk, ready to tell him just what he thought of him.
But the telephone rang and rang and for the first time that Remo could remember, there was no answer.
The next morning, Chiun refused to go with Remo to Teterboro. He was smugly adamant. "I will not expend my small store of energy on barking dogs," he said.
"Well, then, expend your energy watching Julia Child and try to learn to cook something someone can eat," Remo said, beating a hasty retreat.
In him rented car on the way to Teterboro, Remo thought of Chiun and his arrogant refusal to take the attack on Teterboro seriously. Lives were at stake, and another victory for the terrorists might screw up totally the antiterrorist agreement that was in the works.