When the driver got to Harley's tenement building, Harley tried to pay with a fifty-dollar bill.
"Can't change that, buddy."
"Don't see too many of these, I suppose," Harley said.
"Not in this neighborhood. What you got that's smaller?"
"You name it."
"A pleasant little five-dollar bill would be nice,"
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said the cabbie, glancing again at the $3.45 fare on the meter.
"You got it," Harley said. He handed a five-dollar bill to the driver, then waited for his change, which the driver slowly and painstakingly counted out, giving Harley plenty of time to consider the virtues of tipping.
Harley stuffed the change in his pocket without counting it. He had the carton only halfway out of the cab when the driver pulled away.
"Hey, slow down," Harley yelled through the still open door.
"Cheap bastard, screw you and your fifty-dollar bills," the driver called.
He stepped harder on the gas. The cab lurched away. The box of tape players slipped out but Harley caught them before they had a chance to drop hard on the pavement. Then he hoisted them to his chest and still grumbling curses under his breath carried them up to his fourth-floor apartment.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Remo knew why the Secret Service men had ulcers, nervous conditions, and the highest rate of early retirement in the federal service.
Because they were asked to do the impossible. It was impossible to try to protect the President. If someone wanted him dead bad enough and was willing to die himself, a kamikaze attack would work.
Air the Secret Service could do was to try to protect the President against planned killings, against plots on his life whose motive was something different from blind, unreasoning hate. And they worked at it.
Remo had checked the roofs of all the buildings within sight and shooting distance of the Capitol steps where the President would speak in the morning. The Secret Service had already been there. Remo could see the scuff marks in the tar and gravel roofs where men had been clambering around, inspecting the buildings.
And they had checked the trees and the utility poles and the sewers and the manhole covers. Remo checked them too and found tape seals that the Service had placed over the covers. In the
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morning they would check them again to make sure they had not been tampered with.
The Secret Service had logged the make and license numbers of all cars parked in the area and run them through federal data banks, against the lists of everyone who had ever made a threat against any President. If one of the cars belonged to somebody with a history of talking about killing the President, they would have scoured the city looking for him, to place him under arrest.
The inspection took Remo the entire night. Chiun had told him to look for The Hole. But where? And what the hell did an ancient Korean legend have to do with an attempt to kill a twentieth-century President? Still, Walgreen had been blown up in Sun Valley. That was the classic use of The Hole by an assassin. And it had worked.
If there was any trouble at the Capitol in the morning, the Secret Service would probably push the President into a car and whisk him the hell out of there. It was inconceivable that the Secret Service would not be sure its cars were secure; that there was nothing planted in them, no bombs, no poison gas. Inconceivable that the escape route from the capitol would not be secured by agents all along the route.
Pink was beginning to streak the low corners of the sky as Eemo stood across the street from the Capitol and watched the guards watch the platform from which the President would deliver his speech.
Maybe Chiun was wrong. Maybe the attack on the President would be simple and straightforward, a simple bombing attack. It gave Remo chills. The thought stuck with him that someone could have a damned mortar out there somewhere
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in the city and could, with reasonable accuracy, plump down a high explosive fragmentation shell in the President's vicinity while he was talking. And Remo could do nothing about it.
Maybe the platform, the speaking platform itself. Who could tell?
Remo moved away from the wall against which he lounged and into the blackness of shadow cast by a tree. He moved, picking his way from shadow to shadow, across the brightly illuminated street and plaza, toward the Capitol steps. The two guards at the platform looked resolutely ahead, toward the streets as if that were the only place trouble could come from. Remo moved to the side of the long steps. At the base of the building, he climbed the wall and let himself lightly over the top railing of the steps.
He was behind the guards now. They did not hear him and did not turn around as he came down the steps from the direction of the Capitol entrance. He slid under the wood and steel platform which cantilevered out over a dozen of the stone steps, and began to inspect the joints where the structure had been put together.
The joints were clean; Remo went over every inch of the underside of the platform. He ran his fingertips over the wooden four-by-fours and the steel piping that gave the structure its strength. He felt the wood for weaknesses that might indicate some kind of load had been placed in It. Nothing.
His fingertips tapped along the pipe very lightly, looking for sound variations that would signal that a hollow steel pipe was no longer hollow. But all the pipes were hollow.
Glints of light were now coming through the
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wooden flooring of the platform over his head. Remo could hear the guards on either side of the stand moving heavily from foot to foot. In the silent still of pre-dawn Washington, in which no breeze blew and no puff of air moved, he could smell the meat on their breaths. One had been drinking beer too. The sour smell of fermented grains assaulted Remo's nostrils. And once, he had liked beer.
"Lot of crap this is," one guard said. The accent was pure Pittsburgh, a farmer's twang with the harsh consonants of the city stuck into it like tacks in a board.
"What's that?" the other guard asked.
"What the hell we standing here for all night? What they expect? Termites?"
"I don't know," the other said. The voice was nasal New York. Remo reflected that Washington was one of the few cities in the world that didn't have any distinctive speech pattern of its own. It was filled with drifters and accents from all over. The only change now from ten years earlier was there were a few more people saying "Y'all." And that might all stop in a few hours, Remo thought. The idea made him chilly.
"Maybe they're expecting some trouble or something," New York said.
"If they was, they sure as hell wouldn't be going through with this," Pittsburgh said. "They'd keep the President in the White House and not let him out."
"Yeah. Guess they would at that," said New York. "If they had any sense, anyway."
Remo nodded. That was right. If anybody had any sense they would keep the President in the White House until the danger had passed. To hell
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with the freedom of the presidency and to hell with what the President had decided he must do. Remo had just made the decisions for the day. The President was staying home.
Remo rolled out from under the platform and was moving again up the steps when he met Viola Poombs coming out of the building. She was smoothing the skirt of her white linen suit.
"Remo," she called. The guards turned to watch them and Remo did not want to run away from her now. He waited on the steps for her to reach him.
"Working overtime?" he asked.
"Yes. And no smart talk from you either," Viola said. "What are you doing here?"
"Just hanging out." He walked down the steps with her.
"Will your Oriental friend really help me with my book?" she asked.