"The benign?" Helene asked Remo.
"Henry VIII," Remo replied. "Chopped off his wives' heads, but he always paid on time."
"Prompt payment for services rendered must not be treated lightly," Chiun said, raising an instructive talon. "England in good King Henry's day treated us well."
The crowd through which they passed had grown thicker. Remo could see the tail of a downed plane jutting up at a right angle from the street. Swarms of people were gathered around it, snapping pictures. A gaggle of milling bobbies in blue uniforms and high police hats didn't attempt to hold the crowd back. They stood at attention, arms behind their backs, faces glancing intently around the square. What they were looking for, Remo could not begin to fathom.
"I am sorry," Helene pressed Chiun, "but are you claiming to have been an assassin to Henry the Eighth?"
Chiun fixed her with a baleful glare.
"Do I look to you, madam, to be five centuries old?"
Helene hesitated. "Well-"
"Our family," Remo explained quickly, lest an insensitive answer from the French agent cause her head to suffer the same fate as that of Henry's wives. "An ancestor worked for Henry the Eighth."
With Remo in the lead, they had managed to push through the crowd. The aircraft around which the crush of people had assembled had been shot down by an RAF missile. Freed of its payload minutes before the final, fateful attack, the plane hadn't been destroyed wholly in midair. A piece of the tail section had been blown away, causing the plane to lurch forward and sail headlong into the hind end of a parked double-decker bus. Fortunately the bus had been unoccupied at the time.
The plane stood upright, enmeshed in the rear of the large red bus.
"Messerschmitt," Helene said with a knowing nod.
"It sure is," Remo agreed. "A big mess. What do you think, Little Father?" he said to Chiun. "I'll bet you thought you saw the last of these when you offed old Schicklgruber."
"Schicklgruber?" Helene asked, surprised. "Surely you do not mean Hitler?"
"You know any other Schicklgrubers?" Remo said blandly.
Helene looked at Chiun. He examined the downed plane, blithely indifferent to her gaze.
"Are you saying he killed Hitler?" she asked Remo.
Remo didn't want to get into an afternoon of Sinanju history lessons with the French spy. "Indirectly," he admitted vaguely.
"The coward took poison and shot himself before I was able to carry out the deed," Chiun interjected. "A double death for a white-livered lunatic."
"It was totally self-serving," Remo explained. "You see, with wars people go out and hire local help. Who needs a professional assassin when you can slap a uniform on the grocery boy and send him off to fight for you?"
"No one," Chiun lamented.
"Which is why Chiun offered the Allied powers Hitler's head on a post. He figured he'd take out the guy who was causing all the trouble in the world gratis. After that everyone would line up for our services."
"But the little fool robbed me of my prize," Chiun said bitterly.
"I assume the plan did not work out as he envisioned it would?" Helene asked blandly.
"Let's just say that after the little jerk shot himself, the House of Sinanju entered a bit of a dry spell."
Helene was losing interest in Chiun and Remo's fanciful take on history. It was not that she did not entirely disbelieve them-after all, she had seen what these two were capable of. But France and now England were faced with a very real crisis. The plane before them was a part of that threat.
"Why would someone use these out-of-date planes now?" she mused. The question was aimed at no one in particular.
"Because so far they're working," Remo suggested dryly.
"But not any longer, my dear boy," a cheery voice said from behind them.
Remo knew that voice. It was the same one that had spoken to Helene on her cellular phone in Paris. Remo closed his eyes patiently. He didn't think he had the will to deal with this right now.
When he looked back at the speaker, the first thing he saw was that Helene Marie-Simone had grown dreamy eyed. Chiun's face held a look of utter disdain.
Before the three of them stood a man so handsome he made the average male model look as though his gene pool had been set on Puree. Remo knew him as Sir Guy Philliston. Head of the British intelligence agency known simply as Source. Their paths had crossed several times over the years. Remo had never been particularly impressed. The same, apparently, couldn't be said for Helene.
"Sir Guy," the French agent said in breathily accented English. Her face was flushed.
Remo frowned as he glanced at her. "Guy?" he asked. "I thought that was 'Gay.'"
"Quite," said Philliston. A look of minor displeasure sent the tiniest wrinkles up around his perfect aquiline nose. "Good to see you all again. Jolly good. Perhaps at your age you don't remember me, my old friend." He extended a perfectly manicured hand to Chiun. "Sir Guy Philliston," he said with a smile that flashed a row of flawlessly capped white teeth that had never seen the interior of a British dentist's office. The Phillistons imported their own personal D.D.S. from America.
Chiun looked first at the hand, then at Sir Guy. Spurning both, he looked over at the crashed plane. "Yes, quite," droned Philliston, replacing his hand at his side with the gentlest of efforts. He had no desire to create a wrinkle in his impeccably tailored Savile Row suit. "Here to tour the scene of battle, eh?" he said to Remo and Helene. "Quite a matchup yesterday. Jolly good sport."
"Your team was a little late on the field," Remo said.
"Utter cock-up, that was," Philliston admitted. "It seems RAF and our boys were at cross-purposes. No bother. Everything is sorted out nicely now."
"Yes. Now that it's all over," said Remo.
"Rather," said Philliston affably. His expression as he sized up Remo bordered on a leer.
Remo glanced around. "Anyone know where there's a good bulletproof codpiece store around here?" he asked wearily.
SMTTH HAD BEEN UNABLE to find out anything about IV. And that lack of knowledge frustrated him deeply.
As the night had worn on, he had become more and more convinced that he was dealing with a sinister shadow organization whose vile tendrils had its origins in the darkest days of the Nazi influence in Europe.
The clues were there when CURE had first encountered representatives of the group. The truth was, he had spent much of the night cursing himself for not seeing it before.
As his wife slept beside him, he had worked tirelessly, uplinking his portable computer with the CURE database. All he had to show for a night's worth of work was a sore neck and blank computer screen.
Nothing.
There was nothing that suggested the existence of IV. If not for the physical evidence Remo had uncovered, he would have concluded precisely what he had concluded before: there was no larger menace.
It made him feel a little better to find out that he hadn't missed anything in his original search through neo-Nazi files. But not much.
Now Smith knew better.
When morning came, his wife had wanted to go out sight-seeing. Smith first made certain that the government of Great Britain was prepared to defend against a third attack. He learned through his computers that the British military was on high alert. Hoping that this meant a bit more than looking out an RAF window, Smith had sent her off on her own, promising to meet her at noon for lunch.
He continued working long after she had left. When the bombs had dropped the day before and his line to Remo was severed, Smith and his wife had been forced to spend much of their time in the basement of the hotel. They had come through the attack unscathed. However, the phones still didn't work. It didn't matter. He had learned nothing that would aid Remo and Chiun's investigation.
At eleven-thirty Smith logged off his computer, storing it in his special briefcase. He closed the lid and carefully set the locks, sliding the case back under his bed.