At first, the organization, which was called CURE, almost worked. CURE employed thousands upon thousands of investigators, all of whom thought they worked for someone else: the FBI, the CIA, the telephone company, the Chamber of Commerce, or Madame Lulu's Lonely Hearts Club. It had an open-ended budget of millions of dollars funneled to it through dozens of government agencies. It had the most sophisticated computer system known to man, which was able to take in, analyze, and disgorge billions of discreet bits of information. It had secret headquarters at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.
The only thing it didn't have was success.
It was obvious that exposure of wrongdoing was not enough. Even if CURE could find some newspaper to print disclosures and that was not all that easy the public often shrugged its shoulders and went on its way as if nothing had happened. Trying to send wrongdoers to jail through a court system that no longer worked was hardly any more successful.
It was obvious that CURE would have to change if it were to work. It was obvious that it would need an enforcement branch. That branch would be one man: a former New Jersey policeman named Remo Williams.
Williams was a rarity among cops: honest, uncorrupted, and uncorruptible; an orphan with no family and no friends.
So CURE framed Remo for the murder of a drug dealer and railroaded him to the electric chair in the New Jersey state prison. The executioner pulled the switch, the current flowed, and Remo's body arched in agony. He woke up later at Folcroft Sanitarium, but he was officially dead, a man who no longer existed. His fingerprints were expunged from every file they had ever been in. His training was turned over to Chiun, Master of Sinanju, hired by CURE for the sole purpose of making Remo a killing machine.
But in the training, he had made Remo something else something more than a man; and in Chain's mind, Remo had also become his heir. He traveled with his pupil now, just to make sure that no accident befell Remo and wasted Chiun's long investment of time.
Smith stood in the center of the room. "There are two things," he said.
"I've already heard that tonight," Remo said.
"What?"
"Never mind," Remo said. "What is it you want?"
"Have you ever heard of the copa-iba tree?" asked Smith.
"It is not a Korean tree," Chiun said.
"No," said Remo. "And I don't want to hear about it either."
"Its correct name is Copaifera langsdorfii," Smith went on in a helpful, hopeful tone of voice.
"I am sure it is not a Korean tree," Chiun said. "Korean trees all have beautiful names. For instance, there is the Towering Nest of Swans, The Tree That Whistles When the Wind Walks..."
"I don't care what you call it or what its correct name is," Remo told Smith. "I still don't want to hear about it. I need a vacation."
"The tree grows in the rain forests of Brazil," Smith went on.
"That's nice," Remo said.
"I am not surprised it has such a barbaric name," Chiun said. "Sinanju has never made a penny from Brazil."
"It grows quite tall," Smith said. "A hundred feet or more. And it is three feet thick through the center."
Remo stretched out on the floor and closed his eyes.
"We have bigger trees than that in Korea," Chiun said. "Big trees with beautiful names."
"Every six months or so," Smith said, "you can put a tap in a copa-iba, just as you would with a maple tree for syrup, and what you get out is pure, extremely high-quality diesel oil. Just like the stuff that comes out of oil refineries. It's the most valuable tree in the world."
"It must be a Korean tree," Chiun said.
"So?" Remo said, half opening one eye to look at Smith.
"The copa-iba could be an important weapon in our country's energy war," the CURE director said. "It might be more important than nuclear power."
"Why tell me about it?" Remo asked.
"We have been growing a grove of copa-ibas in this country out on the West Coast for the last twenty years."
"And?"
"Now somebody is trying to destroy them," Smith said.
"And you want me to stop whoever it is."
"Yes."
"Find somebody else," Remo said. "First of all, I am not a detective. And I am not a bodyguard. I am especially not a bodyguard for a bunch of hundred-foot-tall trees. I need a vacation. Give me my vacation, and then I'll go sleep in the damn trees if you want."
"Remember the babies going home," Chiun mumbled in Korean.
"What's that?" Smith asked.
"Duty calling," Remo said, sighing. "You said there were two things. What's the second?"
"This is a matter of synchronicity, I believe it is called," Smith said.
"What is?" Remo asked.
"Beware of emperors using new words," Chiun said in Korean.
"During the war, the one in Europe," Smith said, "I had a friend. A German, in fact. A very brave man who did much to help our cause."
"That's nice," Remo said.
"For white men, the Germans are not bad," Chiun said. "Except the little one with the funny mustache. Him, nobody liked."
"Twice this man saved my life," Smith continued. "And I gave him my word that if he ever needed me or my help, all he had to do was ask."
"You want us to work for your friend?" Remo asked, opening his eyes, greatly surprised. It was not like Smith to use CURE or Remo or Chiun for any personal purpose. This flew in the face of everything Remo knew about, the straightlaced New Englander.
"No," Smith said. "My friend, Karl Webenhaus died more than twenty years ago."
"How does that fit in with the copa-cabana trees?" Remo asked.
"Copa-iba. Karl was the man who discovered them just before he was killed."
"How did he die?"
"Chopped into little pieces. By Indians, I suppose."
"Indians are as bad as white men," Chiun said.
"Go on," Remo told Smith.
"Karl's wife and daughter were with him in the jungle when he died. His wife was tortured to death."
"And the daughter?"
"Josefina. She escaped," Smith said.
"And?"
"Just before Karl died, he wrote me a letter, asking me to see to the child's needs if anything should ever happen to him."
"And you have?" Remo asked.
Smith nodded. "I've sent her to schools and occasionally visited her. But we never got on really all that well together."
Remo could understand that. He could imagine what it might be like to have Smith as a guardian. On the whole, he would rather be an orphan.
"Mostly," said Smith, "she has grown up with one of her father's colleagues, a man named Brack. She's quite fond of him."
"How does this tie in to the trees?" asked Remo.
"I got a letter from her last week. That was unusual in itself; we seldom correspond."
"And?"
"She is working on the copa-iba project. Like her father, she's a dendrologist. A tree scientist."
Remo went back to the hole in the window to breathe in more of the outside air.
Smith continued. "She said in her letter that her boyfriend had also been working on the project."
"He isn't now?" Remo said.
"No. Somebody injected some kind of speed drug into a dozen rattlesnakes and left them in his car." Smith's mouth was white around the edges. "The snakes were wild," he went on. "The boy didn't know they were in his car until he got in. All the windows were rolled up. They all attacked him at once. Nobody could get to the body until the snakes had calmed down, which wasn't until a day and a half later. Then they had to saw away the steering post and the door on the driver's side because the corpse was so bloated from snake venom and heat."