"Clever," Remo said. "Maybe when you grow up, you can be a comedian in the state pen."
The kid stepped forward, blocking the car door with his body. "You ain't getting in this car, man."
"Oh, no?" Remo snatched the car's hood ornament and pulled it free of its mooring. Without taking his eyes off the boy, he squeezed the ornament until the metal began to bend in his hand.
When it had folded in half, he buried it in his palm and closed his hand again. Then, applying constant pressure, the way Chiun had taught him, he managed to grind the metal into a powder resembling salt crystals.
He walked up to the leader of the group and poured the powder over the kid's head. "Time to go, Chiun," he said.
The group fanned out and away from the car, congregating around their leader, who glinted in the sunlight like a statue made of glitter.
"Happy I didn't hurt anybody?" Remo asked, starting the car and pulling away.
"A barely satisfactory performance," Chiun said.
"Oh? I thought I was pretty good."
"There was no need to intimate that I am the possessor of an unmanageable temper."
"Intimate? I didn't intimate. I flat-out lied—"
"Oh, 'how sharper than a serpent's tooth…' " Chiun began, permitting a pained look to cross his face.
"Okay, I apologize. Anyway, I'm interested in Moorcock. He was obviously looking for something in the house. What was it?"
"What were we looking for?" Chiun asked.
"I don't know."
"Why could he not have been looking for the same thing?"
"He might have been," Remo said, but he couldn't help but wonder if the good minister hadn't been looking for that money. And where had Billy Martin's father gotten such a windfall?
A man entered the office of a car rental agency and began to tell the clerk behind the desk a story about a terrible driver.
"We very nearly had an accident, and I'd really like to give him a piece of my mind," the man told the clerk.
"I'm terribly sorry, sir. But are you sure he was driving one of our cars?" the clerk asked.
"Positive. The car had one of your stickers in the windshield," the man replied. "I'd like to find out who the guy is and where I can find him."
"Well, it would be highly irregular for me to give out that information, you understand," the clerk said. "And we may not even have a local address for him."
"I understand," the man assured him, surreptitiously pressing a crisp twenty-dollar bill into the clerk's hand.
"What was the license number?"
The man recited the license number of the car. The clerk looked it up and gave him the man's name— Remo Randisi— plus the name of the hotel where he was supposed to be staying.
"Thank you very much. I appreciate this… more than you know."
The man left the rental agency and crossed the street to a large black car. He got into the back, where another man was waiting for him, and repeated the information he'd gotten from the clerk.
"Very good," the other man said. "Now we'll handle this Remo, whoever he is."
"Do you think he's a cop?" the first man asked.
"If he is," the second man said, "he's a dead one."
CHAPTER FIVE
In the morning, Remo's car exploded.
He wasn't in it. No one was, and he didn't find out about it until he came down to the hotel parking lot. Chiun was up in their room composing that same damned Ung poem, and he'd decided to leave him to his artistic expression while he checked out some leads. He was in no mood to listen to Chiun harp about "children" again.
There was a fire truck outside the hotel, and a hose had been run into the parking area beneath the building. Whem Remo got off the elevator at the parking lot level, he saw all the commotion and collared a hotel employee to ask what had happened.
"Some car just exploded, Mac," the guy said. He was one of the parking valets and had in fact parked Remo's car for him the night before.
"Which car?" Remo asked.
The man took a second look at Remo and then said, "Well, I'll be damned if it wasn't yours."
"Mine, huh?" Remo said. "Do they know how it happened?"
"I don't think so. I ain't heard nothing yet."
"But you will, won't you?" Remo asked, slipping the guy a five spot. "Eventually you'll hear all about it?"
"I sure will, mister."
"Well, there's ten more in it for you if I hear about it right after you do."
"You got it."
"Good. Do you think you could go out front and have a cab meet me there? I forgot something upstairs."
"Sure, my pleasure."
Remo took the elevator up one flight and got off at the lobby. He didn't want to be seen walking through the garage with all the ruckus that was going on, and he didn't want to have to take the time to answer questions. As it was, the police were bound to find out that the car had been rented by him, and he'd be answering their questions soon enough. Right now, however, he had a few of his own to get answered.
The cab was waiting out front. He got in and told the driver to take him to the National Motors plant. He was going there to talk to some of the people who worked with Allan Martin, Billy's father.
During the ride, he contemplated the possibility that his rented car had blown up for some reason other than that somebody wanted it to— preferably with him in it. After all, if someone had indeed planted a bomb, they'd done a rotten job because the thing had gone off prematurely… luckily for him. Still, that was the likeliest explanation. At least whoever had done it had saved him the trouble of trying to explain to the rental agency what had happened to the hood ornament.
At the plant Remo presented himself to the girl at the reception area, who was in charge of dispensing security clearance badges to visitors. The girl was young and very pretty, with long blond hair and green eyes. And she was obviously interested in Remo. It took little more than flattery and a few gentle touches, strategically placed where Sinanju had taught him women were vulnerable— for him to appropriate a pass that gave him the right to go anywhere in the plant. He also managed to squeeze out of her the name of Allan Martin's immediate superior. It was Jack Boffa, the assembly line foreman.
"You make sure you stop back this way before you leave," she said hopefully when he was through with her.
"Of course," he said in his most charming manner. "I'll have to return the badge, won't I?"
He wandered through the plant until he was finally able to locate the assembly line, taking the time to observe how the thing was run.
From what he could see, more than a few of the men working the line were pretty drunk, and the ones who weren't drunk were pretty damned sloppy. Unlike Japan, where auto workers took great pride in their work and everyone on the assembly lines sang the company song and committed seppuku if one car was defective— or so he had heard— this looked like the kind of outfit where they called it a good day's work if no more than half of the cars manufactured were recalled for potentially fatal defects.
It was enough to make one seriously consider taking up bicycle riding.
Off to one side he spotted a man who had to be Jack Boffa. He was a tall, solidly built man standing with his arms folded across his chest and a clipboard dangling from one hand. Remo knew that a clipboard always signified authority.
"Excuse me," he said, approaching the foreman.
The man looked at Remo, frowned when he didn't recognize him, and asked, "How did you get in here?"
"I'm authorized," Remo said, touching his badge.
"I guess you are," the man replied, studying the plastic square on Remo's jacket. "What can I do for you?"
"Are you Jack Boffa?"
"That's me."
"Things are run a little loose around here, aren't they?"
Boffa's head swiveled, and he looked hard at Remo. "What are you, an inspector or something? We usually get some kind of warning. We pay enough—"