It was not enough. After less than a decade, Smith understood it would never be enough.
So he reached out to New Jersey for an ordinary-seeming beat cop who had been tested in the jungles of Vietnam, and code-named him the Destroyer.
America's supersecret agency that didn't exist now had an enforcement arm who also didn't exist.
Only then did the hand of CURE truly begin to exert its awesome power against America's enemies.
The tide was turned back. True, it constantly threatened to swamp the ship of state, but America now had an edge. More importantly the Constitution survived intact. Smith bent, folded and spindled it on a daily basis. But only the successor Presidents had any inkling of that.
America struggled on.
The problems came and the problems went. Smith disposed of them with a ruthless efficiency that control of the greatest assassins in human history gave them. Invariably the problems always went away. And just as quickly new ones reared their heads.
Lately Harold had his eye on two particular problems. They existed on separate computer files designated Amtrak and Mexico.
Smith was pulling up the Amtrak file as the sun began to set on another day.
It was forty-three items long, he saw with a frown. For some two years now, train derailments had been piling up at an alarmirng rate. Some were passenger-rail mishaps, others freight accidents. Major and minor, they made the papers so often that late-night comedians joked that the nation's aging rail system was itself one gigantic train wreck.
The latest had occurred near La Plata, Missouri. A Santa Fe freight train had gone off its tracks while rounding a bend. A shifting cargo car overloaded with scrap metal was the official cause. Smith's frown deepened.
It was possible, he supposed. Virtually every derailment had its reasonable cause. A split rail. A vandal switching tracks. Poor track conditions. The numbers of people who annually attempted to beat fast-moving trains to crossings and paid for their folly with their lives continually amazed him. These incidents Smith dumped from the Amtrak file as nonaberrations attributable to human error.
Individually there was nothing to be suspicious of. Collectively they suggested a pattern. But no common cause seemed to percolate up from the mass of news-wire extracts and National Transportation Safety Board accident reports.
Smith stared at the slowly scrolling reports, his tired gray eyes behind the glass shields of his rimless eyeglasses skimming mechanically, as if they could perceive what long hours of study could not: a common link.
His old CIA-analyst skills were as sharp as they had been in the long-ago days when he was known in the Agency's corridors as "the Gray Ghost," as much for his colorless demeanor as for his unflagging habit of wearing banker's gray.
But today they failed him.
Smith hit the scroll-lock key and turned in his cracked leather chair.
Through the picture window of one-way glass that protected the most secure office outside of the Pentagon from prying eyes, Smith let his tired eyes fall on the restful waters of Long Island Sound.
Perhaps, he thought, it was time to send Remo and Chiun into the field on this one. If no force or agency was responsible for this unprecedented string of accidents, it suggested America's rail system was either overburdened or so shoddily run it presented a menace to the nation's vital transportation lines.
If so, exposing the dangerous condition technically fell within CURE operating parameters.
Smith turned in his seat, his pinched patrician face grim with resolve. He reached across the black glass of his desktop for the blue contact telephone he employed to reach his Destroyer. It was a secure line, scrambled and completely insulated from wiretapping. It was second only to the dialless red telephone he kept under lock and key in a lower desk drawer until such time as he needed to reach the current President.
This was not a situation that called for Presidential consultation. The President did not control CURE, any more than he controlled Congress these days. The CURE mandate allowed for Presidential suggestions, but not orders. The only order the President was allowed to give was the one that would close down CURE forever.
Smith's age-gnarled hand briefly touched the slick plastic of the pale blue receiver when his computer beeped once.
Withdrawing his hand, Smith addressed the screen. It was buried beneath the desktop's tinted glass surface and angled so it faced him.
The monitor itself was invisible under the black glass. Only the amber letters floating on the screen showed.
The red light in one corner winked insistently. A message beside it said, "Mexico!"
That meant one of Smith's automatic net-trolling programs had picked up something important. Probably an AP story moving across the wires that contained the keyword Mexico.
Smith tapped the silent pads of the keyless capacity-keyboard and brought it up.
It was an Associated Press bulletin:
MEXICO-QUAKE
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO (AP)
A severe earthquake struck the Valley of Mexico at approximately 2:00 p.m. EST this afternoon. Initial reports say that damage to Mexico City is substantial, and there is significant loss of life. Eyewitness reports add that Mount Popo-catepetl is giving indications a major eruption is near. It is not yet known whether the volcano triggered the quake or if the quake brought the volcano-which had been showing renewed signs of activity in the past several months-to life again.
Smith frowned. This was not good news. Mexico was his other chief concern these days. The uprising in Chiapas, combined with political and economic instability, had turned America's sleepy southern neighbor into a smoldering political volcano.
Only a few months before, Mexican army tanks had taken up threatening positions on the Texas border, but were quickly pulled back. It had been an ominous move, but relations between the two nations had officially returned to normalcy.
But the strains were still there. Illegal immigration, the devaluation of the peso and fallout from the ill-fated NAFTA agreement had produced a growing animosity between the peoples of the U.S. and Mexico. That their respective leaders were outwardly cordial meant little. In the age of electronic news media, public opinion, not political will, drove policy.
As Smith reflected on this problem, a second bulletin popped onto the screen.
CHIAPAS REBEL MEXICO CITY, MEXICO (AP) Subcomandante Verapaz, leader of the insurgent Benito Juarez National Liberation Front, has in the past hour declared that the violent convulsion in Mexico City is a sign from the gods that they have turned away from the beleaguered leadership of Mexico and that the time has come to take the struggle into the capital.
Verapaz, whose true name and identity is unknown, is calling for all indigenous Mexicans to rise up and overwhelm the Federal Army of Mexico.
That decided Harold Smith. The Amtrak matter could wait.
Remo and Chiun were going into the field, all right. But they were going to Mexico.
Subcomandante Verapaz was no longer an internal Mexican problem. He was out to overthrow the lawful government in Mexico City. And a revolution on America's southern border constituted a direct threat to the United States of America.
Harold Smith's gray hand reached out to the blue contact telephone.
Chapter 7
Remo Williams was watching the Master of Sinanju fillet a fish when the telephone rang.
"I'll get it," he said, starting from his seat in the kitchen. It was a cane chair. Chairs were allowed in the downstairs kitchen. Tables, too, although most of the time they ate at a low taboret, seated cross-legged on tatami mats.
"You will not," snapped the Master of Sinanju.
"It might be Smith."