She sighed. "I suppose so, if that's what the Association thinks."
"I'm glad you feel that way."
Carpathian picked up the double-bladed axe and set it on the table.
"That's what I got this for, Cicely."
"I see," she said, and shuddered visibly.
"It should be most effective for our purposes," he said softly.
"I suppose so. But I hate to look at it." It was funny, she thought; she had never realized how much the little man's eyes looked like a cobra's. They were almost hypnotizing.
Ari stood up and took the axe in hand, almost as if he were about to chop a log.
"That thing gives me the creeps," she said.
"It won't for long."
"Have you picked your victim yet?" she asked. She looked in his eyes. His eyes held her. She had her answer without his saying a word. She wanted to scream but couldn't.
Finally he answered her. "Yes, Cicely. I have." It took him ten chops to get exactly the effect he wanted.
The moon was high in the sky when Remo came back across the snow to Alpha Camp. There was a large mound of snow where the A-frame building had been, and the air still carried the faint aroma of burnt wood, an aroma faintly redolent to Remo of his childhood days in Newark when he and some friends would start a fire in a vacant lot, then throw in raw potatoes to char them black. The burnt potato skins gave off that woody smell.
Remo was thinking of Cicely Winston-Alright as he walked past the mound that had been the A-frame, when suddenly he felt a pair of strong arms surround him, and a heavy weight bear him to the ground.
"Gotcha, you bet," he heard the French-accented voice roar in his ear.
"Goddammit, Pierre, it's me," he said. Remo had a mouthful of snow. He felt the big weight get off his back, then a strong hand pulled him to his feet.
"Peer sorry," the big man told Remo. "But you sneak across the snow like an Indian, and Peer think it somebody coming back to make trouble."
"All right," Remo said. "No harm done." He realized how much Sinanju had become a part of him. He had not been sneaking back to camp; he had just been strolling. But his stroll today was a soundless, ghostlike movement, beyond the ability of an ordinary man. He was glad that Pierre LaRue was alert.
The two men went inside the log cabin bunkhouse. Chiun and Joey Webb were sitting on a couch. Chiun was sipping daintily from a cup of tea. Joey's hands held a big tea mug, and from time to time she took a big gulp from it. The fireplace gave off the only light and heat in the room, and the young woman seemed to be vacillating between moving closer to it and pulling away from it. Pierre went to a corner and sat his big body down in an old rocking chair. A cat that had been hiding under the chair scurried out into a dark corner.
Looking at Joey, Remo thought about how much the girl had gone through in the last few weeks and how close to the edge of breaking she must be.
Joey looked up at Remo as he stepped into the jagged circle of light thrown off by the fire.
She smiled a hello to him, and he nodded back.
"Everything all right down with the copa-ibas?" he asked.
She said something in answer, but Remo didn't hear it.
He had turned to face the fireplace and let his mind go out to embrace the flames. For the next two minutes, he thought of nothing but his breathing and the rhythm of his blood as it coursed through his body.
When he came back from his rhythm fix, he saw Joey standing next to the fireplace. An old-fashioned standing hook was set into one side of it, and suspended from the hook was an equally old-fashioned teapot.
"Would you like some tea?" she asked him
Remo hesitated. Since he had been brought, kicking and screaming, into the House of Sinanju, his body had changed. He could no longer eat as he once did: Additives could kill him; most food made him want to throw up. His body was too closely tuned, too sensitive to sensation, to tolerate the garbage that most Americans compacted into their mouths. He was hesitant even to try other people's tea.
"It is not bad tea," said Chiun.
"For an American?" Remo asked.
"For an American, it is excellent tea," Chiun said. "For a Korean, it is not bad."
"Good. Then I'll have some," Remo said.
"Same way, right. No sugar, no milk, no lemon, no anything," she told him
"Right," Remo agreed.
"I never could drink it that way," she said. She began to stutter slightly and then stopped. "Oscar always drank his the same way."
"Don't dwell on it, kid," Remo said, rising to take the cup from her. "What's done is done."
"I know." She made an obvious attempt to be more cheerful. "And now for the good news."
"All right," Remo said. "What's the good news?"
"We've figured out how to solve the problem of making the copa-ibas grow in this climate. Or, at least, I think we have."
"Great," Remo said, "How'd you do that?" Behind him, he heard Pierre LaRue lean forward on the rocking chair to listen.
"Actually, Chiun figured it out."
"It was nothing," Chiun said. Remo nodded agreement. Chiun added, "For me, that is. For Remo, it would have been impossible, because it involved thinking."
Joey reached out and touched Chiun's hand good-humoredly. For a fraction of a second, Remo thought he could see a flicker of pride pass through the old man's eyes.
"So what's the solution?" Remo asked. "Or maybe I better ask first, what was the problem?"
"The problem has always been that copa-iba is a tropical tree," Joey said.
"Not Korean?" asked Remo, with a serious face.
"We have resolved that satisfactorily," Chiun said. "Probably the tree was brought from Korea to Brazil many thousands of years ago. Then it was brought to this country."
Remo nodded. "Got it," he said.
"With a tropical tree," Joey said, "there's practically no place in the continental U.S. where we can grow them, except for a little fringe on the Texas gulf coast and a little tiny bit of southern Florida."
"So the problem is trying to find a way to make them grow up here in this dismal climate," Remo said. "That's why all the blowers and the fans and heaters?"
"That's right," she said.
"Does it work?"
"In a way," Joey said. "I mean, we can grow the trees that way. No doubt about it. But it's not worth it. We use more oil and gasoline to run the equipment than the oil we can get out of the trees. The only reason we've been keeping it going is to have some adult trees to study."
"Then the experiment was a flop?" Remo said.
"No. I didn't say that. The big breakthrough was about six months ago. After all this time of planning and trying and fooling around, we finally discovered a way to get the copa-iba seeds to sprout quickly. It used to take thirty to forty years for a single seed to germinate. Now we can get it to do that in only three or four weeks. That was the first breakthrough."
"How do you do it?" Remo asked.
Joey walked back to the fire. Behind him Pierre was still not rocking, Remo noticed.
"I'm not sure I should tell you," Joey said.
"I think you should. It might help us figure out what's going on around here," Remo said.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that people didn't start dying until your breakthrough with getting seeds to sprout or whatever."
Joey hesitated for a moment. "Maybe," she said. "Anyway, all I do is soak the seeds in this special mixture I've developed. And it works. It really works."
"And who else knew about this mixture besides you?"
"Knows it exists?" asked Joey.
"Yes."
"A hundred people at Tulsa Torrent," she said.
"Who knew what was in it?" asked Remo.
"Just Danny and Oscar and me."
"And now they're dead and somebody's trying to kill you," Remo said.
"It looks that way," she said.
"Why is this so important?" Remo asked. "So who cares if seeds whatchamacallit in weeks or years?"