Holly Rodan stepped inside.
"Chief Phansigar," she said, and bowed.
"What is it?"
"Your children have arrived back safely." She stepped aside, and Joshua and Kimberly Baynes walked into the office.
"Nice to see you home, kids," Baynes said. They smiled at him.
Chapter Twenty-one
The face was what stopped him.
Remo was at the airport, standing among the crowd ready to board the flight for Seoul, when he saw her. And as soon as he did, he knew he had not made a mistake by planning to go to Korea to find Chiun.
She was tall and slim, dressed in a white linen suit. Her dark hair was pulled under a small hat with a veil that partially covered her face, but nothing could hide her beauty. Her skin was pale and translucent, like the petals of a flower. She had full lips that looked as if they were unaccustomed to smiling; a narrow, highbridged nose; and eyes like a deer's, wide-set and soft.
She looked like no other human being Remo had ever seen. There were no traces of any racial ancestry in that face. She looked as if she had been created, apart from the evolution of the planet earth.
Without realizing it, Remo was moving out of the throng of passengers waiting to board and was working his way through the press of people around her. "Excuse me ... Miss ... Miss . . ."
She looked up, registering mild alarm. "Yes?" Remo swallowed, unable to speak.
"Did you call me?"
He nodded, and she nodded back.
He tried to think of something to say to her, but his mind had voided all the words in his vocabulary. Looking at her, all he could think of was the sound of a choir singing in church on Christmas Eve.
"I'm sorry," he said lamely. "I guess I just wanted to look at you."
She picked up her suitcase and turned away.
"No," he said. He took her arm, and her eyes widened in fright. "No. Don't be scared," he said. "Honest, I'm not a nut. My name's Remo and-"
She wrenched herself free of him and scurried into the crowd. Remo sat back against a railing, ashamed of himself. Whatever had possessed him to approach a perfect stranger while a wave of killings was frightening airline passengers all over the world? And then he had behaved like some lunatic wand-waver. He was lucky she hadn't called the police.
Maybe there was something wrong with him. Maybe Sinanju started to play tricks on you after a while. Nothing like this had ever happened to Chiun, but Chiun was Korean. Maybe the old man had been right when he had said, all those thousands of times, that the knowledge of Sinanju was not meant for white men. Maybe there was something in Western genes that couldn't tolerate the training and caused insanity.
Oh, Chiun, he thought. Be there when I come. The woman had been right to run away from him. He shouldn't even be permitted to walk among normal people. If he ever saw her again, he resolved, he would ignore her. It was a good thing he would never see her again. Damned good, because he would cut her dead. Besides, she probably wasn't as beautiful as he had thought. He would ignore her. Too bad he would never get the chance again, because he would ignore her to the point of insult.
She was on the plane, and Remo bodily ejected the man who was seated next to her.
"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Remo said.
The woman reached for the stewardess call button. "No. Don't do that," Remo said. "Please. I won't say another word to you for the entire flight. I'll just look."
She stared at him blankly for several moments, and finally said, "Is that all?"
Remo nodded, unwilling to break his promise so quickly by saying even a single word.
"In that case, my name is Ivory." She extended a small white hand, manicured and sporting a large diamond ring on its index finger. She smiled and Remo wanted to curl up inside that smile like a cat.
He smiled back. "Can I talk now?"
"Try. I will let you know when to stop," she said.
"Where are you from?"
"Sri Lanka," she said.
"I don't even know where that is," he said.
"It is an old, small country with a new, large name," she said.
"Is that where you're going now?"
"In a roundabout way. Mostly I'm going to travel the Orient, shopping."
"Tough life," Remo said.
"At times," she said. "It's my job, you see, not my hobby. I buy antiquities for collectors. Some might call me a glorified errand boy."
Remo thought that no one would ever call her any kind of boy, but he simply asked, "Antiquities? Are they like antiques?"
She nodded. "Only older. My clients want Greek wall friezes, lintels from Egyptian temples, things like that."
"Like old statues," Remo said softly, thinking of something else.
"Sometimes. As a matter of fact, I was looking for one in America and traced it all the way to New Orleans. But I lost it. The one who owned it sold it, then died, and no one knows who bought it."
"Was it valuable?"
"Very old, worth perhaps a quarter of a million dollars," Ivory said. "The owner's landlady said he sold it for forty dollars."
"Must be a beautiful statue to be worth that much," Remo said.
She shrugged. "I've never seen it myself, but I've seen replicas. A stone goddess with several arms. The exact number differs in the catalogs."
"Kali," Remo said, closing his eyes.
"I beg your pardon."
"Nothing. Never mind. Maybe you weren't meant to find it. Maybe it would have been bad luck or something."
"If I worried about curses or luck," she said, "I'd probably never buy anything more than a week old. But this statue might have been special."
Remo grunted. He didn't want to be reminded of the statue. It made him nervous. He imagined he could smell the scent of Kali on the airplane. But it would be gone soon. And perhaps Chiun could rid him of it forever.
He caught her staring at him. For a moment their eyes locked and a terrible sadness came over him. "You look so familiar," he said, his voice almost a whisper.
"I was just thinking the same thing about you."
As the engines began to rev up, he kissed her. He couldn't explain why, but he saw the haunting, longing look in Ivory's eyes and knew if he couldn't touch her, couldn't have her, his heart might as well be torn out of him. As his mouth touched hers, she accepted him with a hungry urgency. Time vanished. In the woman's embrace, he no longer felt like Remo Williams, assassin, running away from his fear. Instead, he was only The Man and Ivory was The Woman and they were in a place far removed from the noise of a twentieth-century jet engine.
"Oh, no," she said, pulling away abruptly.
"What's wrong?"
"My gifts." She rose hurriedly, squeezing past Remo's knees. Her face was suddenly lined with worry. "I bought some presents and left them at the check-in counter. I'll be right back."
"Hurry," he said.
Ivory argued for a few seconds with the stewardesses at the front of the plane before they let her leave. When she rushed down the steps, the two attendants looked at each other and shrugged. One of them picked up a microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are ready for departure. Please take your seats and observe the seat-belt sign." Remo looked at the small bag Ivory had left behind in front of her seat. He strained to see through the tinted glass of the airport. A woman's figure was running, stopping, fidgeting with something, running back.
The plane began to move.
"Hey, stop this," Remo yelled. "A passenger's coming."
Several of the other passengers looked over at him, but the stewardesses pointedly ignored him and went to the front of the plane. Remo pushed all the lights and buzzers he could find as he saw Ivory step out of the airport building. "Hey. Stop the plane. The lady wants to get on."
"I'm sorry, sir. No passengers are permitted to embark at this time," the frazzled stewardess said, turning off the fifteen call buttons Remo had activated.