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raelis, South Africans, Nigerians, and Swedes. There were also fourteen free-lance adventurers. All of them there to try to steal Baqia's new weapon.
"And I'm not counting the liberation groups still in the field waiting for rooms," said the clerk.
"Who's out now? Any of the rooms empty?" asked the captain.
"I'm afraid to check, but I think the British lobbed a couple of mortar shells down a stairwell early this morning. They usually do that when they go out for tea or something."
The captain clicked his heels and saluted.
"Senor American, we have a wonderful room for you," he said.
Crawling on their bellies, the first wave of Baqian enlisted men managed to get two trunks up the main stairway. One wedged open a door with a crowbar. The South Africans had opened up with small-arms fire that had been answered by the Russians, who thought the Bulgarians were at it again. Two Baqian corporals struggled back down the stairs, one clutching an arm shattered by a bullet that had left it dangling.
They had opened up a passage to move all the trunks into the second-floor east room and, except for a small booby trap at the door, there seemed to be no British presence in the room.
The clerk had been right. Second floor 2-E was temporarily unoccupied. All fourteen trunks managed to be winched and dragged into the room with only one more casualty. A young boy from the docks, who had just finished basic training a week before and whose father had paid to have him assigned to the airport, where he would have a chance for promotion without danger, caught a direct hit in the forehead.
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He was brought down under a sheet that would have been white had it ever been washed.
When the way was cleared for the yellow American with the very unusual hands, Chiun entered 2-E. He stepped over the white sheet covering the young man just outside the entrance.
The captain waited nervously. He wanted to politely say goodbye to this dangerous American and also get out of the hotel with as many living men as possible.
"Where are you going?" asked Chiun. "We have taken you to room, yes? You like, yes?" "The towels are not clean. The sheets are not clean." Chiun looked toward the window. "Where is the bay? This room does not have a view of the bay. Those beds have been slept in. Where are the maids? Ice? There should be ice. I do not like ice, but there should be ice." Chiun examined the bathroom.
"The other rooms, they are no better, senor," said the captain.
"The ones that look over the bay are," said Chiun. "I bet they have clean towels and sheets too."
"Senor, we are greatly afraid, but someone of your illustrious wisdom and abilities and personage could succeed where we have failed. Should you arrange for another room, the Baqian armed forces stand ready to deliver your trunks. In salute to your magnificence."
Chiun smiled. Remo muttered under his breath that now he was going to hear how Chiun was finally getting the proper respect. Groveling servitude, like the captain's, always brought out the best in Chiun. Speech down, the captain backed out of the room. Chiun raised a single long fingernail toward Remo.
"As an assassin, you must learn not only to carry out your emperor's wishes, but to go beyond them to
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what not only is good but appears good. Your President thinks he wants a machine, quietly delivered, and the respect of the people of Baqia, and the world."
"Little Father," said Remo, "I think the President wants us in and out without trouble, with the doohickey that Corazon has. I think that's what he wants."
"There is a lack of elegance to that, you know," said Chiun. "It is like a thief, stealing."
"I was in the same oval office with the President that you were. I heard what he said."
Chiun smiled. "And if he wanted typical shoddy workmanship, he would have used American. He would have given the assignment to you. But no. He gave it to me. He has chosen Sinanju and thus his name, whatever it is, will shine in history."
"You don't know the name of the President of the United States?" asked Remo incredulously.
"You keep changing them," said Chiun. "I learned one. He had a funny name and then there was someone else. And soon there was someone else. And one of those was an amateur assassination." Chiun shook his head. He did not like America's penchant for amateur assassinations, hate killings, and all manner of devilment that made these people barbarians. What they needed and what they would now get was elegance, the sun source of all the martial arts, Sinanju.
Across the main street in the presidential palace compound, Dr. Bissel Hunting Jameson IV, second assistant director of the British Royal Academy of Science, did not know that his room had been taken by someone else.
He and his staff were all immaculately attired in
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white summer trousers, blue blazer with Royal Academy seal, white bucks, school ties, and Walther P-38's tailored into their shirts. They held straw skimmers in their hands and they were the only ones ever seen in Baqia who could cross Route 1 in midday, midsummer, wearing these clothes without raising a sweat.
It was as if this race of men had been bred with internal cooling systems.
The offer being made by Dr. Jameson, in rich aristocratic English emanating from the bowels and resonating out through the mouth, with each vowel a trumpeting declaration of basic natural superiority, was this:
Britain shared Baqia's destiny. Britain too was an island. Britain, like Baqia, had national interests and faced currency problems. Together, Britain and Baqia could march forward exploiting both Baqia's new discovery and Britain's experience in manufacturing secret devices.
By the time Dr. Jameson finished, if one did not know that Baqia was an island slum of shacks and abandoned sugar fields and Britain was an industrialized nation somewhat on hard times, an observer would have concluded that Her Majesty's government and the current dictator of a rock protrusion in the Caribbean shared a common heritage and future.
Corazon listened to these white men.
They had paid what was now the standard fee to see the machine in operation. In gold. Corazon liked gold. You could trust gold. He especially liked Kru-gerrands.
Corazon's minister of treasury pocketed two coins as he counted. Corazon noticed this. Corazon felt good. He was an honest treasurer. A thief would have
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stolen fifteen coins. There were stories about men who stole nothing, but they were just stories, Corazon knew. The gringos stole also, he knew. But they seemed to have it better organized, so you never saw the coins disappear while they explained they were really trying to help you.
"For you," said Corazon, "we will execute a rapist right before your eyes with my great powers."
"We wait anxiously," said Dr. Jameson. "Being somewhat of an expert on the subject of voodoo, although not of course such an authority as your excellency, we have never heard of a 'protector spirit' such as the one in your box." Dr. Jameson smiled.
"The white man's powers are one thing, the black's and brown's are another. That is why you no understand. I do not understand this atomic bomb of yours and you do not understand my protector spirit," said Corazon, who had coined the phrase when the Russians had been there earlier that morning for their demonstration.
"Bring on the vicious rapist that he may taste the vengeance of his community. Yes?"
Dr. Jameson's delegation eased the minicameras and microinstruments out of their pockets. Sometimes, with an unsophisticated device in its early stages, its very design might divulge its secrets.
Generalissimo Corazon kept the machine under a blue velvet drape at his left beside the gilded Presidential throne chair, which was set on a small platform.
The vicious rapist turned out to be a middle-aged black woman with a red bandana and an orange dress.