Fool's Gold (12 page)

"Compared to being French, why not?" said Chiun.

Terri turned around. They were alive. Unscathed. And standing behind Hamamota whose eyes were open wide with amazement. He looked first at the two and then at his little computer. He punched in several commands.

The computer immediately flashed a message back. In green luminescent letters, the computer told Hamamota: "Good for you. Once again you have succeeded. The two are dead."

Froth formed on Hamamaota's lips. His face turned red. His eyes bulged. He punched new information into the computer.

The information said: "Not dead. Standing behind me."

The computer was instantaneous in its response. "Reject inaccurate information. Please check source material."

Hamamota looked behind him again.

"Alive," he punched into the machine.

The computer answered: "All input accurate until last message. Must reject."

"How did you escape alive?" asked Terri.

But Remo and Chium were not listening to her. Chiun had seen screens like that. What he wanted to know was where was the little yellow face that ate the squares and the dots. He asked Hamamota.

"Not that kind of computer," the Japanese said.

"No Pac-man?" said Remo.

"Not that kind of computer. It killed you. Why are you not dead?"

"Does it do horoscopes?" asked Remo.

"I am a Leo," said Chiun. "That's the best sign. Remo is a Virgo. He doesn't know that but I do. He couldn't help that anymore than he could help being white."

"You dead," yelled Hamamota angrily. "Why you not dead? Why you standing here?"

"Maybe it has Missile Command?" said Remo. "Where's the joystick for shooting missiles?"

"No Missile Command. This assassin computer. Best in world. Number one."

"How the world demeans glory. They have made a game of assassination. The profession of assassin is now reduced to an arcade game," Chiun said.

"You dead," yelled Hamamota.

"Does it have blackjack?" asked Remo.

"You bombed," said Hamamota. "I bombed you."

"It did work the bombs, Little Father," Remo said to Chiun.

"Still a game," Chiun said.

"Heeeeeyahhhh," yelled Hamamota and leaped into a martial arts position, hissing like an animal.

"What's that?" asked Remo.

"Another game," said Chiun in disgust.

"You die. Heeeeeeyahhhhh," screamed Hamamota, thrusting a bladelike hand toward Remo's neck.

The hand bounced back with four broken bones. The neck didn't move.

"Could I set off a bomb with that thing?" asked Remo.

"Pigs use booms," Chiun said. "Chinamen use them. They invented gunpowder because they lacked internal discipline."

Hamamota's hand hung limply by his side. His eyes bulged with hate and from his very spine, he threw a kick out at the head of the aged Korean. Chiun walked by and went to the computer inside the attaché case.

"I have seen advertisements for a boom where there is a bucket to catch the boom and that is how you score."

"I don't think this is that one, Little Father," said Remo, "because the temple really blew up."

"Maybe there are controls for catching the booms too. Does this do catching and if so, where does it score?" asked Chiun.

Hamamota lay on his side, his back thrown out of joint, his striking hand limp, exhaustion and pain on his face.

"Listen to me, fat thing," said Chiun. "Does this have a scorer? Can we blow Calcutta up from here? If we can, how many points do we get?"

"Why would you get points for blowing up Calcutta?" asked Remo.

"Have you ever seen Calcutta?"

"No," said Remo.

"Go there sometime. You would get not only points but a blessing for it. One of the truly bad places in the world," Chiun said.

"Baghdad is bad," said Remo.

"Baghdad has beauty," said Chiun.

"Baghdad has Iraqis," said Remo.

"No place is perfect," said Chiun, "except Sinanju."

"How many points for Baghdad?" Remo asked Hamamota. The Japanese wriggled onto his belly. Inch by painful inch, he crawled toward Remo and Chiun. When he got to Remo's shoes, he opened his mouth to bite and Remo lifted his foot and stepped down with one precise step, separating Hamamota into two parts.

Terri fainted.

"See if you can do Calcutta," said Remo.

"I can't do Calcutta," said Chiun.

"Why not?"

"No joystick. I think this fat Jap probably threw it away."

By the time Terri recovered, Remo and Chiun had carried her back to the temple ruins and were digging around for the Hamidian inscription.

"You didn't have to kill him," she said to Remo.

"What should I have done?"

"Rehabilitate him," said Terri.

"Right," said Chiun. "Correct." And then in Korean he said to Remo: "What is the matter with you? You would argue with a stone wall. Do you really think this woman knows what she is talking about?

"Thank you," said Terri, sure the kindly old Korean was explaining decency to his rude and crude student.

"You're welcome," said Chiun to Terri, and then to Remo: "See how easy it is when you treat idiots like idiots."

"I just want you to know this," Terri told Remo. "There has been death and destruction this day and all you could think about was playing games with human lives. You kill without remorse or even anger. I could understand anger. But nothing? Nothing? Nothing?"

"Would it make you feel better if I hated everybody I kill?" said Remo. "You want hate?"

"Moron," said Chiun in English.

"I don't know why you put up with him," Terri told Chiun.

"Neither do I," said Chiun.

Chapter Eight

Dr. Harold W. Smith waited in the headquarters of CURE, sitting atop staffs he could not reach, a network unconnected to anything, running dummy corporations and fronts all operating without purpose.

Through the years, he alone had set up these groups to create a network of people gathering and dispensing information, all them helping, without knowing it, to help CURE fight crime and to keep America alive.

Only Smith, each president, and CURE's lone killer arm knew what CURE was. Clerks gathering information on illegal trucking and fraud never knew for whom they really worked. Government agencies with vast sprawling budgets never knew how much of their workforce actually worked for that secret organization set up in Rye, New York, behind the facade of the sanitarium called Folcroft.

Smith had prepared for everything and he had not prepared for this. He was not even sure how long the networks would keep working or what they would do or if they would just gather, organize, penetrate, and then do it all over again because the information just wasn't being used.

He didn't know. Only the computers would know, and his computers' brains were as blank as a baby's at birth.

For the first time since those murky days when a desperate president had called on him to set up this organization, Harold W. Smith was out of touch with it all.

For the first time, there were no two dozen problems to be juggling at one time.

For the first time, there was only that blank computer terminal, with the lights flashing meaningless symbols.

And suddenly Harold W. Smith found himself doing something he had not done since grade school when he had finished reading Peter Rabbit ahead of the rest of the class. He was doodling with a pencil. He was drawing pictures.

There was a box inside a box inside a box.

He looked at it a moment and then he knew what he would do. Trying to track down the missing computer records had failed. There had been no response.

But if he set up just the sort of illegal operation that activated the CURE network? Then when it latched on to him, he could send Remo up through the network....

The pencil dropped on the desk. So Remo could go up through the networks and then what? None was connected to any other and Smith was disconnected from the whole mess. He was alone and in this aging part of his life, when the body stopped responding to the commands of the mind, he was becoming useless.

And then the telephone rang.

It was the technician in the new headquarters in St. Maarten. They had received a strange message several days after the failed transmission from someone. Would Smith be interested?

"Absolutely. I want to know everything about the message, especially where it originates," said Smith.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we didn't get that. Just somewhere in the western part of your country."

"All right. What does it say?" Smith asked.

"It says 'Offer interesting. Will only deal gross.' "

"Deal gross?"

"That's it, sir."

"Did the sender mean big or large or ugly or what?" Smith asked.

"I don't know. Only deal gross, it says."

"Who will only deal gross?"

"He didn't send the message properly," the technician said. "We didn't get a name or frequency or anything."

"All right. We're going to transmit again."

"During a storm again, sir?"

"No. Continuously. Around the clock," said Smith. "Sun and rain, storm and clear. Sent it all over."

"I certainly hope the stockholders of Analogue Networking Inc. don't find about this, sir," said the technician.

"Why should they?" asked Smith. What was this? Some kind of blackmail?

"It would just be terribly costly," the technician said.

"That's right. And I'm telling you to do it and don't you worry about the stockholders," Smith said. "That is not your concern. You understand?"

"Yes sir," the man said.

"Just do it," Smith said.

In Beverly Hills, Barry Schweid informed Bindie and Marmelstein that he had found a producer who would give him a percentage of the gross profits. He was taking all his screenplays to the other producer.

So Hank Bindle and Bruce Marmelstein called an urgent meeting. If there were a producer out there willing to give gross points, that meant he was sure the screenplay was dynamite. He was sure it would make money.

Therefore, the screenplay was good. But which screenplay? There had been a half-dozen. Bindle and Marmelstein owned four Schweid treatments.

"Was it the dynamite box-office blockbuster?" asked Marmelstein.

"No, I don't think so. The dynamite box-office blockbuster was so boring people fell asleep when they read the title."

"What about the new-wave film that was going to bury all the other producers?" asked Bruce Marmelstein.

"Nobody could understand that," said Hank Bindle.

"The assassin thing?" said Marmelstein.

"Right," said Bindle. "I bet that thieving producer wants the assassin thing."

"We don't own the assassin thing," Marmelstein wailed. "That was the screenplay we didn't buy."

"Why not?"

"We didn't have anyone to read it," said Marmelstein.

"Where was the creative director?"

"She quit when she found out she was getting less than the secretaries."

"What about the secretaries?" asked Bindle. "Couldn't they read it to you?"

"It came in on a Saturday."

"So you just rejected it?" said Hank Bindle, angered.

"Why not? It looked like any other Schweid script to me. How should I know it was a good script? There wasn't a picture in it."

"What do you mean, picture? You mean you can't read?" said Hank. He stood up from the table. "I have been beating my buns off for months now trying to get a picture off the ground and now my partner tells me he can't read."

"Why didn't you read it?" said Bruce. "You could have read it."

"I was giving meetings."

"You could have read it. It wasn't long. It was less than half an inch thick. Read it now," said Bruce, bringing a carton of manuscripts from behind a large marble statue of a girl holding a lamp of wisdom.

"Okay," said Hank. "I'll have it read by midnight. Give it to me."

"What do you mean, give it to you?" said Bruce, his neck jewelry clanking with rage.

"Give me the script and it'll be read by morning."

Marmelstein reached into the box. There were three scripts about a half-inch thick each.

"It's one of these," he said. "The epics are three-quarters of an inch."

"Do I have to take all three?" asked Hank Bindle.

"No. Just the assassin one."

"Is that the one with the coffee spot on it?"

"You can't read either," screamed Marmelstein.

"I used to. I just don't need it anymore. If I could read, I'd be a publisher, not a producer. I used to read beautifully. Everybody said so."

"So did I," said Bruce.

"Why did you stop?" asked Hank.

"I don't know. You don't use something, you forget how," said Bruce.

"I can still recognize my name in print," said Hank Bindle.

"I can too," said Bruce Marmelstein. "It's got a lot of round bumpy letters in it."

"Mine has got curls," said Hank Bindle.

Chapter Nine

Chiun had wandered off when Remo grabbed Terri by the arm and growled, "Come on. You've marched us all over every depressing place in the world. We're getting out of here. Another day in this dump and I'll have rickets and morality and an undying affection for cows."

They picked their way slowly over the lumps of marble and stone and in the distance saw Chiun's tiny figure, swathed in his brocaded kimono, standing near the rubble of the temple, looking down at something.

The beggars who lined the pool to the now-destroyed temple had already begun to drift back, taking their accustomed begging spots.

"What's he doing?" Terri asked Remo, looking toward Chiun.

"He likes to pose," Remo said. "Looks like he's doing something significant."

"He must be doing something."

"Suit yourself. Go see." Remo freed Terri's arm and she walked quickly down along the length of the pool toward Chiun.

A beggar approached Remo. One eye was rolled back into his head and there was dried spittle along the right side of his mouth.