"Someone who can tell you where to look. There have been a dozen murders recently. All of the victims had just gotten off an International Mid-America Airlines flight. All strangled after they left their airplanes. It's the airline of death. Do you hear me?"
"How do you know this? Why haven't I heard of it?"
"Because reporters cover a murder here and a murder there and they don't know it's one story. Now you do. One story. Many murders, all the same." And the caller gave the cities the deaths had occurred in.
"How do you know?" asked the reporter, but the caller hung up.
The next day, every newspaper on the wire-service line carried the story. IMAA became the Airline of Death. By the time the television news department got through with the story, a viewer got the impression that to fly on IMAA meant certain death by strangulation.
Reservations were canceled as people switched to other airlines. IMAA flew half-full flights, then quarter-full flights, then empty planes.
Then IMAA stopped flying at all.
It took two days, and in Folcroft Sanitarium, behind the one-way glass shielding him from the untidy outside world, Harold W. Smith knew that what had happened to IMAA could happen to every airline in America. Every airline in the world.
So did the President of the United States.
"What's happening?" he asked over the special red telephone line that ran from the White House directly to Smith's office.
"We're on it," answered Smith.
"Do you know what this means?" asked the President.
"I do know, sir."
"What am I supposed to tell the heads of the South American countries? What about Europe? They know what it means too. If it spreads, are we going to close the airways to passenger travel? I don't care what you do. I don't care if you're exposed and have to go under, stop this. Stop it now."
"We're working on it."
"You sound like an auto mechanic," said the President disgustedly.
Smith held the red phone in his hand and stared out through his windows at Long Island Sound. It was a dark autumn day and storm warnings were up for all the boats. He put that phone away and took another and tried to reach Remo. He got Chiun instead.
Chiun was in the hotel room, and with relief Smith heard him say that Remo had not only been told about the serious problem but also now understood its magnitude and had come around again. Both he and Chiun were very close to putting the perpetrators out of business, all for the glory of Emperor Smith.
"Thank God," Harold W. Smith said, and hung up. Across the country in a Denver hotel room, Chiun gave a formal little bow to the telephone and set out to find Remo. Not only had he not spoken to Remo, he had not even seen him for a week. But he knew he could make him understand.
For now he was prepared to tell him of the greatest failure in the history of Sinanju, and he was not going to see it repeated here in a little 200-year-old country, doomed even before it began to grow up.
Chapter Eight
Remo saw the snow of the Rockies and did not care. He sat in a lodge by a fireplace and did not answer questions about what he did for a living or if he liked Vail this year or if he preferred Snow Bird in Utah. One of the young women flocking around him mentioned that she hadn't seen his skis.
"I ski barefoot," he said.
"Are you being insulting?" she asked.
"Trying my best," Remo said.
"I think that's cute," she said. She gave no sign of leaving, so Remo got up, left the fire and left the lodge, and began walking in the snow. It was a sun-crisp day in the Rockies and the autumn snows had begun and the world was alive, so incredibly alive.
And there were people out there who welcomed death. Young people. Killing happily and dying happily, in some nightmare of a world.
He saw skiers use the edges of their skies to turn, the better ones in tighter control, knowing that when they put pressure on the edge of the downhill ski, the skis would turn. But what would they do, thought Remo, if they cut with their downhill ski and there was no turn? Like him, with those crazies off the just Folks Airlines. Everything he had been trained for, things that had become instinctive, suddenly were no longer useful. It was like leaning on a downhill ski but not turning. He paused to think about that and squatted in the snow and idly let the fresh powder sift through his fingers. He had met religious fanatics before and he had killed them when he had to without even a look back. He had fought and killed political zealots, maniacs who were sure their cause was right to the point of death.
Why was it different this time? What was it that had stopped him from simply killing that little bubble-headed blond girl and closing the book on that particular assassination squad?
He didn't know the answer, but he knew he had done the right thing outside of Raleigh-Durham airport. Somehow, he knew, it would have done no good to finish off that girl. She really did love death. So did the two young men he killed. They all loved death. And something inside Remo was all knotted up and he knew he could not give them all the death that they lusted for. Some reason, some instinct, something stopped him. And he didn't know what it was.
He headed across the slopes, past warning signs of deep powder and unmarked trails. He wore a light jacket but did not need it. He knew the temperature was low; he did not feel the cold as pain but instead as something that automatically made his body generate its own heat. Everyone's body could do the same thing if it were trained properly. In bed, it was never a blanket that made heat; it only kept in the heat that was made by the body. Remo could do the same thing, but he didn't need a blanket. His blanket was his skin, and he used his skin the way all men did before they invented clothing.
This was Remo's explanation to himself of why Sinanju worked; it harnessed all those vestigial powers in the animal body, all the powers that man had let die, and the ability to do that was the major accomplishment of an ancient house of assassins from a village on a west Korean bay.
It was colder now and Remo walked into deep snow and his body began to swim through it, without his knowing it, moving like a fish, a shark of the airy snow. His mouth breathed in the air in the snow and it tasted of the fresh pure oxygen no longer found in the cities. He lost track of time. It was perhaps only minutes, or maybe hours, before he was out of the snow, standing on rocks, and then he found the place. It was a small cave, an opening in the great stone mountain, and when he entered, he realized he was retreating from everything.
And there he sat, his body quieted, waiting for his mind to work out for itself just what was going on. He had sat for several days when he heard movement outside the cave. It was not the sound of feet compressing snow, but a pure gliding movement, as soft as a breeze.
"Hello, Little Father," Remo said without looking up.
"Hello," said Chiun.
"How did you know I was here?"
"I knew where your body would take you when you were frightened."
"I'm not frightened," Remo said.
"I did not mean fear of being hurt or being killed," Chiun said. "I meant another kind of fear."
"I don't know what is going on, Chiun. All I know is I don't like it and I don't understand it." He looked up at Chiun for the first time and he was smiling. "You know how you're always saying we should leave this country and go to work for this king or that shah, and I've always said no because I believe in my country the way you believe in your village?"
"Not the village. The village is just where the House of Sinanju is," Chiun corrected. "The house. The house is what we are and what we do."
"Whatever," Remo said. "Anyway, let's do it. Let's go to another country. Let's just pick up and go."
"No. We must stay," Chiun said.
"I knew it," Remo said with a sigh. "All these years, you've just been waiting for me to say 'go,' so you could say 'stay.' Right?"