Fool's Gold (13 page)

"Beg pardon, American friend. Do you have a dollar for a poor but honest beggar?"

"No."

"Half a dollar?"

"No."

"Anything... any alms?"

"Here's a dime," Remo said. "Go buy yourself a cabinet ministry."

He flipped the beggar a coin, and saw Terri drop to her knees next to Chiun in the temple wreckage, and begin to smooth away debris with her hands. Casually, Remo strolled along the pool toward them.

When he joined them, he said, "Oh, jeez, not another one."

"Shhh," Terri said. She was tracing her fingers over a gold plaque, following the lines of the peculiar wedge-shaped letters that had been chiseled into the soft metal. The plaque was now curled up at both ends, like a piece of fresh lettuce.

Remo guessed that the plaque had been buried somewhere under the temple and had been blown to the surface by the force of the explosion.

"I don't care what it says," Remo said. "We're going home."

"We'll go where it takes us," Terri snapped. "Be quiet. This is important."

Chiun looked toward Remo and shook his head as if Remo should not waste his time arguing with an imbecile. Remo nodded.

He picked up a handful of smooth stones from the rubble and amused himself by tossing them at the beggars who were again lined along the low wall facing the pool. He put fourteen stones in a row into fourteen different tin cups. Every time one of the stones landed in a cup, the beggar would pull the cup to his body, shield it with his arms from the other beggars, and peer inside to see what godly gift he had been sent. Not one of the beggars showed any interest in the destruction of the old temple or even came up to look. Nor had the police showed up. Did India have police? Remo wondered. The country had a hundred thousand gods, but did it have any police? How could you govern a country that had more gods than police?

Terri stood up after ten long minutes.

"Spain," she said. "The gold went to Spain."

"And then to the Bronx," Remo said in disgust.

"It says Spain," she said stubbornly.

"You find this writing acceptable?" Chiun asked Terri.

"Yes," she said. "Ancient Hamidian script." She paused, then asked, "What do you mean?"

"Nothing," Chiun said and turned away.

Terri looked at Remo quizzically, but Remo said, "Don't ask me. You two are the big language mavens. I'm just along for the ride."

"I've noticed," Terri said.

Generalissimo Moombasa received Lord Wissex in his master bedroom suite, in which a bevy of naked blonde voluptuous beauties would have seemed as unnecessary as another harmonica player at a hillbilly convention. Moombasa obviously had no room in his life to love anyone but himself.

The walls of the bedroom were made of what might have been imported marble, but it was hard to tell because they were covered, almost every square inch, with mural-sized pictures of Moombasa greeting his subjects. In the small corners where the walls met, and the murals didn't totally mesh, there were smaller photos of Moombasa. Some men like mirrors over their beds, but Moombasa had another enormous mural there, the same size as his big bed, so that his last view at night, before shutting his eyes, was his own smiling face.

Moombasa was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows, eating soft-boiled eggs from a cup. The runny albumen seemed intent on escaping his spoon and kept dribbling down onto the front of his blue velvet smoking jacket, which had gold-fringed military epaulettes on the shoulders.

Wissex was amused to note that Moombasa ate with a golden spoon from a golden egg cup. In Wissex Castle, where servants had been feeding noblemen since the days when Moombasa's ancestors were eating their own children, they used simple sterling and old china.

Albumen and yolk running down his chin, Moombasa asked, "What success?"

"None. We have failed. All is over."

The gold spoon again stopped halfway to Moombasa's mouth. Its slimy cargo puckered up against one edge, held there by surface tension, and then, as Wissex watched, the spoon tipped more and the weight of the slime exceeded its cohesion and more egg slid off the spoon's bowl onto Moombasa's chest. He ignored it.

"What?"

"It is true, Generalissimo. We have failed. The United States has won again, crushing under its militarist heel your worthwhile ambitions to rescue your people from poverty and its oppression."

"Hell with that crap. What about the gold?"

The spoon was forgotten now and its contents just kept dribbling off onto Moombasa's velvet jacket.

"I'm sorry, great leader," said Wissex. "But the House of Wissex is withdrawing. We have been at this for centuries and perhaps it is time now to close down our operations. Perhaps we will raise bees." Wissex could smell the eggs now.

Moombasa's heart went out to Wissex. He had never seen the Englishman looking and sounding so depressed. "But training. Special squads. All the things I count on you for," he said. "What of them?"

"You will have to have your own men take charge," Wissex said.

"My own men couldn't take charge of a shoeshine stand," Moombasa said. "Not if somebody gave them a picture of feet. I need you. What has happened?"

"The woman and the two bodyguards have escaped again. They have foiled the efforts of my best men."

"And you have none of these best men left?" Moombasa asked.

"We have many," Wissex said. "Our best operative is still available, but he planned on retiring several months ago. I didn't want to disturb him in his retirement, particularly on such a difficult mission."

"Disturb him," Moombasa ordered with a bellow. "You have obligation to provide me with your best. Perform this mission. That mountain of gold must be mine."

"And Hamidia's," Wissex corrected.

"Yes. Hamidia's. Of course," Moombasa said. "Nothing must stand in the way of the gold being returned to its rightful owner. Me. And Hamidia."

He threw the egg plate and the spoon and the tray holding them to one side. It all teetered on the edge of the bed for a moment, then fell over, smearing itself on the expensive Persian carpet. Moombasa arose, walked to Wissex, and put an arm around the Englishman's shoulders. Wissex moved slightly in his chair so that none of the egg all over Moombasa would drip on his tweed suit.

"We have been together a long time, Lord of Wissex," said Moombasa. "Now, at the pinnacle of our adventures together, is no time to stop. You use all the resources of Wissex. Together, we conquer the evil fascist Yankee beast."

"Well, if you insist..."

"I insist, I insist."

"I'll get on it right away," Wissex said. He rose quickly, turning away from Moombasa to protect his suit, and walked toward the door.

He went out without looking back. Moombasa looked at the closing door, pleased that he had been able to buck up Wissex's courage. A productive House of Wissex was important for his continuing rule. He thought how strange it was. People always thought of Englishmen as cool, not given to worry or panic, but here was Wissex, a very old title, coming to him, Generalissimo Moombasa, for encouragement. Someday it would be a chapter in his memoirs. How he had come to the rescue of the British lion and given him the courage of Moombasa, when the Englishman was on the verge of losing all his faculties.

Wissex reappeared in the doorway and Moombasa's eyebrows lifted in surprise.

"The same fee system?" Wissex said.

"Of course," Moombasa said grandly, with a smile. Wissex nodded and left. Just like a child, Moombasa thought. Wissex needed to be led. Just like a child.

He smiled to himself and then looked around to see if his egg had suffered so much damage on contact with the carpet as to render it uneatable.

"Commander Spencer here." The voice crackled over the long-distance telephone line.

"Wissex. Put on your scrambler."

Neville Lord Wissex waited at the Hamidia airport in the last of a bank of telephone booths. He knew that all the telephones in Hamidia were tapped because the House of Wissex had set up the procedures itself. The very best equipment in the world, Wissex had told Moombasa, when he sold him the surplus British Army World War II devices. Moombasa had insisted also on buying scrambler decoding equipment and Wissex had been happy to sell.

But the scrambler he now attached to the ear-piece and mouthpiece of the telephone could not be decoded by Moombasa's expensive toys. Wissex could barely restrain a smile. Who in Hamidia had anything to say worth tapping?

But Moombasa had insisted on all the equipment when Wissex told him that the United States routinely tapped all the telephones in its country. The generalissimo had the mind of a child.

Spencer's voice came back onto the line, crackled and distorted through electronics.

"Got it, Neville," he said. "How goes it?"

"I just left the idiot. In for a penny, in for a pound."

"Good," said Spencer. "I thought you might have a spot of trouble this time."

"Not really. He's an infant. I had him ordering me to continue the battle against the American oppressors," Wissex said.

"So, what's next, old bean?"

"Well, honestly Spencer, I'm a little annoyed at this woman. And her two bodyguards. I thought you should take a run at them. Bring in the girl and dispose of those other two for good."

"I thought you'd never ask, old chap."

"It's just that I've had enough of wogs and hired help," Wissex said. "It's time to send a Brit. A real Brit. To do a Brit's work."

"I'll bring their heads back on my shield," Spencer said. "Where will I find them?"

"I've sent them to Spain next."

"Ahhhh, the land of señoritas and olé. Did I ever tell you about— —"

Wissex knew Spencer was about to launch into one of the interminable stories of his former career as Britain's top spy. And he had heard all the stories over and over again, so he said quickly: "No, I don't think so. But later. I've got a line of baboons standing around, waiting to use this phone. Wouldn't do for them to notice the scrambler."

"Got you, old man. Next time."

"Yes. We'll talk," Wissex said.

Chapter Ten

Only the ocean hadn't changed.

That unusually philosophical thought occurred to Dr. Harold W. Smith as he sat in the semi-darkened office at Folcroft Sanitarium, looking out through the one-way glass of his windows at the Long Island Sound, pitching and surging at the end of the long green manicured lawn that dribbled down to the narrow sliver of beach.

He had changed. He had come to CURE and its first director, picked by a president he didn't like for a job he didn't want, and he took it only because the president had told him that he was the only man in the nation who could handle it. Smith then had still been young— ready to retire from the CIA after twenty years of service to his country and ready to go back to teach law in New England. The law had been his first love.

And suddenly he had been made the greatest law-breaker in the history of the United States. It was CURE's mission: to work outside the law to capture the lawbreakers; to use criminal methods to stop crime from overrunning the United States.

Smith knew of only one way to work. He had thrown himself into the assignment with the same rockhard New England tenacity he had brought to everything in his life. His marriage, never very exciting to begin with, had slowly slipped away into an arm's length exercise in boredom. He had lost touch with his young daughter and she had fallen away into the sink of drug addiction.

And CURE hadn't worked. It had struggled and carved out many successes, but it had all amounted to trying to bail out the ocean with a spoon. No matter how hard you bailed, there was even more water to take the place of whatever you removed. So too with crime. In the United States, it had become almost infinite in its scope and as it had grown more successful, it had enticed more and more people into the criminal life. In recruiting, nothing succeeds like success.

So, almost against his will, Smith had found it necessary to take CURE one step further. He had recruited a killing arm. Remo Williams, a Newark, New Jersey policeman, who had killed in Vietnam. Remo had been surly and felt abused at having his comfortable life disrupted. He had not wanted anything to do with CURE. But he had been the right man. An orphan with no family. A man who loved his country and had killed for it. Smith knew he had chosen correctly: that Remo would kill again for his country.

And he had... hundreds of times, now beyond count. Maybe they were still trying to spoon out the ocean but in Remo, CURE now had a bigger spoon and those whom Remo visited did not live to be criminals again.

But only the ocean had not changed.

Remo had changed. He had started out reluctantly, doing CURE's work because America needed it. But then had come the change. He had started to do the work because he was an assassin and assassin's work defined him and made him whole. Remo's sense that CURE could make a difference was long gone. There were still residues of his patriotism but they were thinner, more nebulous now than they had ever been. Remo now killed because he killed, and America was better to kill for than anybody else he could think of at the moment.

Chiun had changed too. He had been brought to CURE just to train Remo, to teach him to kill and to survive. It had started for the old Korean as just another job, but that had not lasted long.

Somewhere along the way, Chiun had decided that Remo was not just a student, but that he was to be Chiun's successor as the next Master of Sinanju. Chiun had also decided that Remo was the reincarnation of the Hindu god, Shiva the Destroyer. Smith had never really understood what Chiun was talking about. It was enough for Smith to know that Remo and Chiun were different from other men; that their minds worked differently and their bodies worked differently. Smith had never expected, and now never understood, the strange powers they would have and why they were so much more than other men.

Chiun once had explained that the only secret of Sinanju was to teach men to use all their powers; to emulate the insects who could leap scores of times their own height and lift hundreds of times their own weight. He cited the case of the shark and its senses which could detect one part of blood in a million parts of water. This, Chiun had said, was the potential that man could live up to. Smith didn't believe it. There had been nothing like that in the human physiology courses he had taken at Dartmouth. But he had seen those powers too many times now to disbelieve them.