Fool's Gold (16 page)

"Luck has nothing to do with it, old top," Spencer said.

At London's Heathrow Airport, there was a long corridor leading to the waiting and boarding area for Air España planes. Only passengers were permitted past the human x-ray security machines that controlled the corridor.

Forty minutes before he was due to board, Spencer was at a cocktail lounge in the airport, waiting for someone to arrive.

"Stolichnaya, double," he ordered from the bartender.

"How do you like it, sir?" the bartender asked.

"Neat, of course," Spencer said. "And bring the pepper."

When the bartender came, he set the large shot glass in front of Spencer, along with the pepper shaker. Spencer sprinkled some of the spice on top of the liquor. The pepper grains floated there for a few moments, then slowly settled to the bottom of the glass.

Spencer looked up at the bartender and smiled. "The only way to drink vodka, don't you know," he said. "The pepper takes out the impurities and carries them to the bottom of the drink. What's left is pure vodka. I've always drunk it that way."

"I see it all the time," the bartender said in a bored voice. "I read about it once in a James Bond book. Even Yanks do it now."

"Until I told him about it," Spencer said frostily, "that man who wrote about James Bond used to drink his vodka with Coca Cola." His eyes defied the bartender to argue with him, but the man just drifted off toward another customer.

Spencer nursed his drink for about ten minutes until the man he had been waiting for showed up. The man was Spencer's size and wore an identical blue pinstripe suit with a red handkerchief in the lapel. Like Spencer, he had a rust-colored mustache and he wore an ecru-colored Panama straw hat. Standing alongside Spencer in the darkened bar, they looked like twins or an actor and his stunt double.

"Are you ready?" Spencer asked.

"As I'll ever be, Commander," the other man said.

"Synchronize watches," Spencer said. "Two forty-three and forty seconds. Forty-two. Forty-four."

"Got it," the other man said.

"All right," Spencer said. "At exactly 2:47, we move."

"Righto."

"Here's the ticket," Spencer said. He handed the other man his airline ticket and the man strolled off down the corridor toward the Air España loading gates.

Spencer drained the last of his vodka, careful not to disturb the pepper at the glass's bottom, which he knew was now contaminated with fuel oil. He thought about leaving the bartender a tip, but decided not to. Let his Yank friends who drank vodka and pepper leave him a tip. Spencer picked up his thin nylon gymnasium-style bag and stepped into the men's room next to the bar. Inside one of the toilet stalls, he took from the nylon bag a long doctor's robe, which he put on over his suit. A pair of dark wrap-around sunglasses covered his eyes. From the bottom of the nylon bag came a worn brown leather doctor's satchel.

Spencer rolled up the nylon gym bag and stuck it inside the waistband of his trousers. He checked his watch. Two forty-six and thirty-five seconds.

Almost time.

He stepped out of the men's room, just as the digital clicker of his watch registered the full minute.

Two forty-seven.

He heard a scream from down the Air España corridor. He ran toward the sound. Ahead of him, a group of people were clustered together.

"Let me through," Spencer called out in a heavy German accent. "I am a doctor. Let me through."

He ran past the x-ray detector machines and pushed his way through the crowd until he was next to the man with the red mustache. The man was lying on the floor, gasping for breath, his hands clutching his chest.

Professionally, Spencer knelt alongside the man and felt his pulse.

"Very serious," he said. "I vill need room to work. Stand back. All of you. Schnell."

He hoisted the man into his arms and walked along the corridor toward the planes, then pushed his way through the door of the first men's room he reached.

It was vacant and the other mustached man quickly got to his feet. Spencer leaned against the door, keeping it closed, as he stripped off his doctor's robe. The other man put it on, along with Spencer's wrap-around sunglasses. He tucked Spencer's nylon gym bag into his waistband, turned, and glanced at himself in the mirror.

"Pretty neat if I do say so myself," he said. Spencer checked himself in the mirror on the back of the door. He heard people thumping outside.

"All right," he said. "Let's go. Ooops, the ticket." The man now wearing the doctor's costume handed Spencer the Air España ticket and then led the way through the door.

With the same thick German accent Spencer had used, he said, "Everything isss all right. Lucky I vas here. Just a piece of candy stuck in ze throat. Lucky I vas here. I fixed him up all right."

Quickly, the man in the doctor's smock walked away. The eyes of the crowd followed him as Spencer stepped from the men's room and walked over to the Air España counter, where he got a boarding pass, then took a seat and buried his face in a magazine.

Three minutes later, the passengers were boarding, and five minutes later, his arms and legs wrapped with guns and rockets and knives and bombs, Commander Hilton Marmaduke Spencer was sprawled comfortably in a window seat in the plane's first-class cabin.

It had been a while, he thought, since he had an interesting assignment from Wissex. And these two, the Yank and the old Oriental, might be interesting. Eighteen men had already died trying to remove them. It might be fun.

Eighteen dead. It did not bother him. None of those eighteen had been Brits. Wait until the Yank and the Chink ran up against British steel.

He smiled, and the faint pounding began again inside his temples.

The union of motion pictures authors had been no help to Smith.

"I'm looking for a screenwriter," he had said, and the woman who had answered the phone had said, "Pick one. We've got seven thousand members."

"This one would probably have a word processor or computer," Smith said.

"That narrows it down to six thousand nine hundred," the woman said. "It's a great excuse not to work. They can't write movies but they sure as hell can play Pac-man. Got any more clues?"

"Maybe he's doing a script on Oriental assassins," Smith said hopefully.

"Not a chance," the woman said.

"Why not?"

"Nobody's doing assassins. Chopsaki. The movies never gross anything. Bruce Lee is dead but he was dead at the box office long before he died. Afraid I can't help you." And she hung up.

And that was it. Smith realized that he had no choice except to wait for the lunatic to call him again. The telephone rang.

"Smith here."

"You know who this is," the voice said.

"Yes," said Smith. "Except I don't have a name to put with the voice."

"That's all right. No matter what you call it, a rose is a rose."

"Obviously, you're the product of a classical education," Smith said.

"You know," said Barry Schweid, "I don't really trust you."

"I thought we were getting along fine," Smith said.

"We'll see when our negotiations go on," Schweid said.

"What negotiations? I gave you everything you asked for."

"That's why I don't trust you. What kind of producer are you anyway? I ask for 250 and you give me 250. What kind of crap is that? I ask for ten points and I get ten points. Gross points. Marlon Brando don't get points that easy and he wanted to play Superman's father in a suitcase."

Crazy, Smith thought. Hollywood had gotten to this one's brain, whoever he was. There was nothing left. What was he going to ask for now?

"Well, what is it you want?" Smith said.

"I've been giving it a lot of thought. I want three hundred fifty thousand and thirteen points."

Smith hesitated a moment. If he offered it, what would this madman want next? He thought for a split second, then reverted to his tight-fisted New England roots.

He slammed his fist on the desk.

"Not a chance," he shouted. "That's it. No three hundred fifty and no thirteen points. And no two hundred fifty or ten points either. The offer's now two hundred and eight points. Take it or leave it. You've got five seconds. One. Two— —"

"Hold on; wait."

"No wait," Smith snarled. "I'm not going to be jerked around forever. Three. Four. Five— —"

"Okay, okay," whined Barry Schweid. "You got a deal. Two hundred and eight points. I'll throw in a free rewrite. Don't tell the union."

"I don't know," Smith said. "It's a lot of money."

"One-ninety. I'll take one-ninety."

"Okay," Smith said after a pause. "now who the hell are you? You're not playing games with me anymore."

"All right. I'm Barry Schweid."

"Address and phone number. My lawyers will need it," Smith said.

Schweid rattled off the numbers and said, "I don't know much about you, you know. Just who are you?"

"The person who's going to pay you one-ninety and eight points. I want that script in my hands the day after tomorrow." Smith gave him the number of a postal box in Manhattan. "Without fail. You got it?"

"Now you sound like a producer," said Schweid. "It'll be there."

"And I don't want a lot of copies floating around either," Smith said, and then hung up.

As he hung up the telephone, Smith smiled. Maybe he should start treating Remo that way. It might be more effective than trying to reason with him. It was a thought he decided to hold for a while.

And three thousand miles away, Barry Schweid replaced his telephone receiver. By trying to negotiate on his own, he had cost himself sixty thousand dollars and two points.

It wasn't fair. Producers were always taking advantage of writers. He decided he needed help, and the longer he thought, the more sure he was that he had exactly the right people to deal with one thieving producer.

Two thieving producers.

Bindle and Marmelstein.

Chapter Fourteen

The crowd sounded far away, but when they shouted "Olé," even the walls seemed to vibrate.

Remo groused, "This is getting absurd. Can't you take us anyplace without cows?" but Terri answered only with an annoyed "Shhhhh."

She was walking through a darkened tunnel, playing a flashlight on the walls. The only other illumination came from a single small lightbulb fixed to the stone ceiling of the tunnel thirty yards behind them and from a thin sliver of sunlight that snaked in under some kind of large wooden door twenty yards in front of them.

"Olé! Olé!" The crowd roared again.

"It's here somewhere," Terri said in exasperation, waving the flashlight angrily along the sweating stone walls. The air was musty, filled with sour dampness and the sweet decaying animal smell that reminded Remo of hamburgers. From back in the days when he was able to eat hamburgers.

Remo noticed that Chiun, standing alongside the woman, was rubbing the toe of his sandal in the white powder deposits on the stone floor, which years of dampness had washed from the tunnel's limestone walls. Chiun's toe scored the powder along the base of the walls, as if he were idly marking time, but Remo could tell, by the concentrated hunch of Chiun's shoulders, that he was not idling.

As Terry Pomfret continue to play her light on the walls, feeling the stone with her free hand, looking for something, anything, Chiun turned away to the other side of the tunnel and began to examine the powder on the floor there.

Toe pushed through the powder. Step. Toe again through the powder.

Remo was bored. He slumped down into a sitting position on the floor. The wall was cold and unyielding against his back and he felt its dampness through his thin black t-shirt. He watched Terri wandering around, shining her light, and Chiun wandering around, dragging his toe, and realized he was tired. Tired of the assignments, tired of the travel, tired of the same damn dullness of it all. He tried to think back to the days, so many years ago, before he had become one with Sinanju.

He had never thought of being an assassin then. He had been just a cop, his head filled with cop's ideas and cop's goals and cop's ambitions, most of which involved staying alive, not letting the bastards put a bullet in your belly, and getting out at age 55 after twenty years minimum service and spending the rest of his life fishing. He never even thought of assassins and didn't know that they existed.

But suppose he had thought about being an assassin, what would he have thought? That it was an exciting glamorous life? The spies who came in from the cold? James Bond with exploding suitcases and poison pellets and a license to kill? One-man battles against the Mafia? Women sniffing around?

And what was the truth?

It was all of those things and none of them. It was Smith, always with a new assignment for him, always worrying about the end of the world, the end of civilization as we know it, the end of CURE. And Remo would grumble and take the assignment and almost all the assignments were wait, wait, wait. A few minutes of exercise and then more waiting. Only the exercise, the chance to use his skills, kept him happy and busy. The waiting just made him bored.

He watched Chiun push his toe through the dust.

Was Chiun bored too? Had thousands of years of Masters of Sinanju spent their lives in boredom and desperation, wishing something, anything, would happen?

No. It was the difference between Chiun and himself; the difference between the real Master of Sinanju and the young American who would someday be the next reigning Master of Sinanju.

Chiun could take each day as it came, each part of life as it happened, his being filled with an inner peace and kindness that came from knowing who and what he was. Remo was still unsure, confused, torn between the worlds of the West where he was born and the East where his spirit now lived. But Chiun was at rest with himself, and it made Remo envy his peaceful composure.

Chiun, still shuffling his feet through the limestone powder, had reached Remo. His sandaled foot touched Remo's.