"Insolent lout. I should have known that a white boy untrainable in the subtle arts of Sinanju would lack the refinement to appreciate beauty as well."
"I'm as refined as the next white lout," Remo said.
Chiun's complaints about Remo's shortcomings no longer bothered him. He had been hearing the same complaints for more than ten years, since the first time Remo was introduced to the old master in a gymnasium in the sanitarium where Remo found himself the morning after he died.
Actually, he never died in the first place. It would have been nice if someone— anyone— had gone to the trouble of informing Remo that he wasn't really going to die in the electric chair he was plugged into, but bygones were bygones.
During those terrible moments in the chair, Remo's life didn't flash before his eyes. The only thing that did register was the ridiculous, laughable injustice of recent events. Remo Williams had been a rookie cop with the Newark Police Department, who had been sentenced to fry in an electric chair because a drug dealer he'd been chasing had had the misfortune to die. Remo hadn't killed the pusher, but he'd been the most convenient person to blame at the time. So he'd gone to the chair and tried not to think about anything too much, and when he woke up, he was in a windowless hospital room in a place called Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.
For a brief moment Remo thought he must be in heaven, but the face peering into his own disabused him of any otherworldly notions. It was Harold W. Smith's face, a pinched, lemony face spanned by a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and a permanent scowl. Dr. Smith was, as always, wearing a three-piece gray suit and carrying an attaché case. He never asked Remo how he felt about coming back from the dead. He didn't have to. Dr. Harold W. Smith had engineered everything, from the false arrest on.
Remo complained that since he was officially dead, he had no identity. Dr. Harold W. Smith seemed pleased. At least, he had shuffled his papers with a little more gusto than before. It was as close as Smith got to acting pleased.
He took Remo to the gymnasium to meet Chiun. The eighty-year-old Oriental would, he explained, make a new man of Remo. And he did: Remo became, through the years, a man who could live under water for hours at a time. Who could catch arrows in his bare hands. Who could climb up the sheer faces of buildings without the aid of ropes or ladders. Who could count the legs on a caterpillar as it inched across his finger. Who could walk with no sound and yet hear the heartbeat of a man a hundred yards away. For what Chiun taught him was not a technique or a trick, but the very sun source of the martial arts.
The old Korean was the Master of Sinanju, and possibly the most dangerous man alive. Harold Smith had hired him to train a man for a mission so secret that even Chiun himself could not be told about it. The mission was to work as the enforcer arm of an organization so illegal that its discovery could well mean the end of the United States. CURE belonged to America, but America could not claim the organization because CURE worked completely outside the Constitution. CURE blackmailed. And kidnaped. And killed. Because sometimes those methods were necessary in fighting crime.
Remo Williams was trained to kill. Silently, quickly, invisibly, as only a master of Sinanju could kill. Harold W. Smith directed Remo to the targets, and Remo eliminated them.
The target this time was Duncan Dinnard, whose mansion loomed now in front of Remo and Chiun. The house was surrounded by guards, obviously armed.
"Okay, everybody up. Rise and shine," Remo shouted, clapping his hands and whistling.
"Who goes?" one of the guards called out, holding his handgun in firing position.
"White garbage," Chiun said under his breath.
'What did he say?" the guard demanded.
"He said we're here to collect the garbage," Remo answered.
"He's a garbage man?" the second guard asked, looking at Chiun suspiciously.
"Civil service," Remo said, as if that explained everything.
"He don't look like no garbage man I ever saw," the first guard said.
"Besides, we don't have any garbage left. It was picked up yesterday."
"That's where you're wrong," Remo said.
"Whadaya mean?" the first guard asked.
"You do have some garbage left."
"Like what?" the second guard asked.
"Like you," Remo said.
The bars on the gate were very close together, much too close for a human body to fit between them under ordinary circumstances.
Remo's hands sped between the bars, took hold of each man by the throat, and pulled. By the time the two men had been squeezed between the bars, they were dead, crushed to death or electrocuted, whichever came first.
"Sloppy," Chiun said, shaking his head in disgust.
"It worked, didn't it? I'm going over." Remo opened his hands and let both men slump to the ground.
He vaulted the twelve-foot high fence from a standing position, and when he landed on the other side, Chiun was standing there waiting for him.
"Between the bars," Chiun said, smirking. "Some of us are above cheap and flamboyant displays."
"Cheap—"
"Let us get this over with," the old Oriental interrupted. "I'll go to the boat. You try the house."
"First one to find Dinnard gets to do the dirty deed," Remo said.
Chiun closed his eyes and said, "One does not refer to one's profession as a 'dirty deed.' "
"Come on, Little Father. Do you think I'm a complete idiot? Wait, don't answer that."
"A wise decision," Chiun said, and headed for the dock where Chief Dinnard's yacht was moored.
Remo started for the mansion, came across ferocious guard dogs twice, reasoned with them, and left them unconscious but unhurt. There was no reason in the world to kill a dumb animal.
Remo approached the house, having passed by countless TV security cameras without being seen by one. Thinking invisible, as he had been taught to do by the Master of Sinanju, could work wonders for a body.
His next decision was whether to simply force the door and enter or ring the doorbell. He decided that it would be more interesting to ring the bell.
"Whadaya want?" the man who answered the door asked.
"Do all you fellas have the same manners?"
"What?"
"Never mind. Is Chief Dinnard in?"
"Who wants to know?"
Remo looked left, right, behind him, then back at the big man and said, "I guess I do."
"Funny man," the guy said, and started to close the door.
Remo put one finger on the door and it stopped cold. No matter how hard the other man tried to push, it wouldn't budge.
"Hey," he said, staring at Remo's finger. "How're you doing that?"
"Leverage. Is the chief at home?"
Still impressed, the man replied, "Yeah, he's home. Hey, could you teach me that?"
"What?"
"That," the man said, pointing to Remo's finger. "Leverage."
"You want to learn leverage?"
"Sure."
"Watch," Remo said. He took his finger from the door and held it up in front of the man's face, catching and holding his eyes. In one quick motion the finger flicked forward, the man's eyes rolled up into his head, and he slumped to the floor.
"Well, if you're not going to pay attention…" Remo said, stepping over the prone body of the sleeping man. "Don't worry, I'll find him myself."
The house was huge, but Remo's instincts were operating one hundred percent, and he felt as if he could smell Dinnard's presence in the house. He smelled something else too. Perfume. A woman— there was a woman in the house with Dinnard, which could be a complication.
Following his nose through the huge house, Remo finally came to an opulently furnished bedroom, with mirrors and pillows and a huge bed. On the bed was an equally huge man, being ministered to by a lovely blond woman with big, smooth, pink-nippled breasts, delicate hands, and a full-lipped mouth, all of which were in use at the moment.