Finally, the phone stopped ringing. Agonizingly slowly, it was being raised to an ear. Another pause and then Remo could hear Chiun's voice, mocking him, and he could picture the look in Chiun's eyes as the old man said into the phone:
"Where is the dog that bites?"
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Hotel Caribou was only a few blocks from their apartment. Remo told Chiun to protect at all costs the lives of the three men meeting in Room 2412.
Then he burned up the highway in his rented car, hoping to meet Chiun at the hotel before anything happened.
Remo was too late.
When he pulled up to the Caribou and double-parked out in the street, police cars already were pulling in at angles before the main entrance.
Remo sidled into the crowd of police and detectives and asked, "What happened?"
"Don't know," one policeman said. "Three people killed somehow."
So Chiun had been too late. He had not been able to get to the Caribou on time. And because Remo would not listen or try to understand the proverb about the dogs, and because he arrogantly had gone ahead to Teterboro Airport, the three colonels were dead and the antiterrorist pact set back for, only God knew, how long a period of time.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Remo accused himself as he ducked into the hotel and started up to the twenty-fourth floor to see if there were any pieces that he could pick up to try to salvage something.
Clever, clever, clever.
It had really been well done, the old man told himself as he walked slowly down the street, back to the East Side apartment
The assassination attempt had been clever, but its planner should have known that it would not deceive the Master of Sinanju. Perhaps, China thought, someone thinks that Chiun is growing too old. That he has lost him skills. Fool, he thought.
All his life, he had been sustained in his work by his pride in his skills; and then, one day, the use of them had become an end in itself, as it had, he was sure, with every Master of Sinanju who had come before him.
Now Chiun used his skills, and the poor and the young of him village lived. It was that simple. Life was always simple for those who did not try to get out of it more than was in it
Still, he mused, it would be nice to retire. To sit back in the village of Sinanju, at the edge of the water, mending fish nets, children about him, paying to him the respect and homage that was due a Master who had gone out into the world beyond the seas and had come back with victory over all the world's challenges.
But before that could happen, there would have to be a Master to replace him. And of course that meant Remo, who could not really be a white man. Somewhere in the mongrel matings that produced all Americans, there must have been a Korean, blood of Chiun's blood, a member of the House. Remo was too good to be just a white man.
It had been Chiun's plan from the first moment he had met the young American. The American had looked at him, down the barrel of a gun, and with no qualms, no misgivings, no second thoughts, had attempted to shoot Chiun. That had been ten years ago, and in those ten years, a mere ten years, Remo had advanced his skills almost to the point of perfection. Chiun thought with pride of Remo's genius, his ability to do things with his body that before him, only Chiun in the world could do.
Only Chiun and one other.
One other. Remo had come far, but now he faced grave danger. It was in his nature to scoff at the tales of typhoons and of dead animals and of the dog who bites, but there was more truth to legends than to history; history tells only of the past, but legends tell of the past and present and future.
So, while Remo might laugh in his vile American way, he must be protected from the mortal threat of the dead animals, no matter whether he wished to be or not. This was Chiun's commitment to the people of Sinanju, who looked to their Master, not only for sustenance, but for the appointment of a new Master who would continue that sustenance.
And that someday Master was now in peril of his life. The episode today at the Hotel Caribou had shown that. It would have been normal to presume that the three men who were meeting inside Room 2412 would be attacked from outside. Remo might have made that presumption. But Chiun had found the three would-be assassins inside the room, cloaked in the garb of security men, there supposedly to protect the three colonels but actually assigned to kill them.
Well, they would kill no more. Chiun had seen to that, and then had removed the three important men to another room where they could be safe and could continue their meeting in privacy. '
Yet, the plan of attack had been well-conceived. And those conceptions were drawing nearer and nearer to Remo, threatening him, and Chiun wished that Remo could be convinced to move away from this assignment. It was for that reason that Chiun had refused to tell Remo what the legends meant and who him adversary was. For, if once Remo knew, him pride would prohibit him from walking away. Instead, he would seek out his confrontation with the enemy. So, he kept Remo ignorant of the truth.
As he turned into the door of the apartment building, the tiny, aged Oriental smiled slightly to himself, recalling the look on the face of the Chinese officer when Chiun had entered the room and disposed of the three assassins. The look told of a man who had heard the legends, and had, at that very moment, come to believe them; the look of a man who knew he was seeing a typhoon blow.
And as the typhoon named Chiun rode up in the apartment house elevator, he vowed that if it must come to it, Remo would be protected from the dead animals, even at the cost of Chiun's own life. Even at the cost of breaking a lifelong vow that the Master of Sinanju would never raise hand against another from his village.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"All right, Chiun, how'd you do it?"
Chiun turned to look at Remo, who was pacing up and down the carpeted floor of the liying room of their apartment.
"Do? Do what?"
"The three colonels. How did you know the security men were fakes?"
Chiun shrugged, his shoulders moving slightly underneath the heavy brocaded blue robe. "One knows what one knows," he said.
"All right, then, how did you know that the attack on Teterboro was a red herring?"
He looked at Chiun who was about to speak and said disgustedly, "I know, I know, 'one knows what one knows,'" parroting Chain's Oriental sing-song. "But why the hell didn't you tell me?"
"But I did tell you. I warned you of the dog that barks and the dog that bites. If you then choose to join a chorus of barking dogs in baying at the moon, that is your business."
"You've got to stop talking to me in riddles, Chiun. I've got to know what things mean," Remo said.
"All things are riddles to him who will not think," Chiun said, folded his hands over his chest and turned from Remo to gaze out the window into smog-laden New York.
Remo exhaled an exasperated puff of air, started to speak again, but was interrupted by a knock upon the door. "Now what?" he mumbled to himself. "First fat, then thin, then the dead animals," he said, again parroting Chiun. "This is probably the dead animals."
"Come in, it's open," he roared.
The door pushed open and Dr. Harold W. Smith stood there. He looked with disgust at the open door, as if it had somehow offended him, then said, "I'm glad to see that you are still vitally concerned with your own security."
Remo had already this day had enough of Smith to last him the rest of his life. "What's to worry?" he asked jauntily. "Now that I know you're having us tailed, what do we have to fear? Have no fear, CURE is here."
"That was a mistake," Smith said. "We had agents following everyone who left The Bard. Two of them just happened to pick you up."
"And two of them damn near got killed for their trouble," Remo said. "Will you tell me why you are suddenly sticking your patrician nose into field business? Since when has it become necessary for you to chaperone me?"