Warren Murphy: Balance of Power

The petals fell off on contact. They just didn't make plastic like they used to. With a flick of his foot, Remo sent the ball of garden hose containing the assistant careening to the ceiling, where it bounced spectacularly and veered off in a trajectory toward the door. It sped through the exit and came to rest exactly where Remo had planned, in the gutter in front of the manager.

"It's the worst store in New York!" the manager screamed so loud that his voiced cracked. "Maybe the world!"

Remo flashed him the okay sign as he trotted past.

"It's the pits!" the manager yelled. "Save your money. Go someplace else!"

But already a small crowd was filtering through the doors, anxious to buy. After all, it was New York, and a bargain was a bargain.

Remo grumbled as he pulled back the oars on the rowboat.

"Don't go so fast," Smith said, his pinched lemon face squeezed tight against the wind as Remo plowed across the lake at forty knots. "You'll attract attention."

Indeed, a few boaters on the lake in Central Park turned their heads as the little rowboat flew past with the speed of a Harley Davidson at full throttle.

"Attract attention?" Remo looked across at his two passengers. Smith was dressed in his usual three-piece gray suit, which he would have worn even if the meeting had taken place under water. Next to Smith sat an aged Oriental, with skin like parchment and thin, cloudlike wisps of white hair on his head and face. He was swathed in a long robe of red brocade. "If this is your idea of an inconspicuous meeting place, you're nuttier than I thought you were," Remo said.

"Forgive him, Emperor," the old Oriental said as he flicked his frail hand from the sleeve of his kimono, displaying fingernails as long as penknives. "He is an ungrateful child who does not understand that it is his honor to propel this craft for the American emperor and the Master of Sinanju." He bowed his head toward Smith. "Also, he seeks to disguise his faulty breathing with this show of irritation."

"My breathing is perfect," Remo protested.

"As you see, Emperor, he is also arrogant. Now, if the Master of Sinanju had been given a decent specimen to train instead of a fat meat eater with skin the color of a fish belly..."

"Better watch it, Chiun," Remo cautioned. "Smitty's the white devil, too. Anyway, you're just mad because I didn't bring back the potting soil."

"You see? He admits it. This oafish person who has failed to bring his old master the one item which would have filled the master's final years with joy even brags to you that he is incompetent. And what was that item, you may ask? It was not one of your airplanes which serve inedible foodstuffs and require that one wait endlessly in line to use the lavatory. It was not a television set on which is shown violence and pornography in place of its once serene daytime dramas. No. What the Master of Sinanju had requested as the final flickering light in his twilight-dimmed life was only earth from the ground. Simple dirt, Emperor, so that I might have had the pleasure of growing bright flowers to ease the pain of my weary life."

"I told you what happened," Remo said.

"He was too occupied engaging in a senseless altercation, in which not, even one individual was properly assassinated, to remember his old master."

"I know about it," Smith said flatly.

"Lo, Remo. All the world knows of your loutishness. An assassin who does not assassinate is a useless assassin. You are a sluggish, forgetful, and ungrateful wretch who fails even to bring a small pot of earth to an old man."

"It was disgraceful," Smith said.

"See? See?" Chiun jumped up and down in the boat delightedly. "I would be most grateful, Emperor, to accept a new pupil at your command. Maybe someone young. The right color."

"You could have been caught, Remo. You know what that would mean. The end of CURE." Smith turned his head in disgust.

Remo said nothing. He knew Smith didn't bring him out in the middle of a lake to slap his wrists.

And Smith was right. Not that Remo was bound by loyalty to CURE, as Smith was. CURE was what sent Remo out to kill people he did not even know, against whom he held no grudge. CURE was responsible for the thousand motel rooms instead of one home, for the near certainty that he would never have a woman of his own to love, or children to bear his name, for the plastic surgery that had changed his face and the unending stream of paper to change his identity.

Who was Remo Williams? Nobody. A dead policeman with an empty grave and a marker somewhere in the eastern United States. Only the Destroyer remained. And CURE.

But the end of CURE would mean the end of Smith, too. It was arranged that way. To Smitty, the prospect of his own death was just another item of information in his orderly file clerk's mind. If the president ordered CURE to be disbanded, Smith would press one button on his computer console to destroy all of CURE's information banks in sixty seconds. Then he would descend unhesitatingly to the basement of Folcroft sanitarium, where his casket and a small vial of poison waited.

For Smith, suicide was just another routine thing he would do one day when he was ordered to. But somehow, and Remo would not have been able to say why, he would miss Smitty's bitter face and acidic ways.

"What's the assignment?" Remo asked softly, breaking the silence.

"A former CIA agent named Bernard C. Daniels. He blew the lid on the agency about a year ago in Hispania."

"A double?"

"No," Smith said. "A fine operative, really, judging from his past performance. But an alcoholic now. His memory is gone. Even under hypnosis, Daniels draws a blank about the Hispania business. It seems he was sent there on a routine mission, requested an extension, disappeared for three months, and then staggered into Puerta del Rey one morning and announced the CIA presence there. A big international mess, and nobody knows anything about how it happened or why. Daniels claims the CIA tortured him. They deny it. And now that the press has forgotten him, it's time to remove him before he becomes a further embarrassment to the CIA."

"Pardon me for knocking your old alma mater, Smitty, but the CIA's an embarrassment to the CIA."

"Nobody knows that better than I do."

"Since when do we do the CIA's laundry?" Remo asked.

"Washing clothes is an appropriate task for so incompetent an assassin and so ungrateful a pupil," Chiun said, nodding appreciatively toward Smith.

"The agency's head of operations, Max Snodgrass, has family connections to the president. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have taken this... er... project, but I served with Snodgrass in World War II, and if he's anything like he used to be, Daniels could take out a full page advertisement in the New York Times before Snodgrass could manage to get rid of him. Snodgrass doesn't know about CURE or me or you, of course. As far as he's concerned, he's going to identify Daniels to a freelancer who will then take care of things."

"Identify him? Why not just give me Daniels's address?"

"Snodgrass insists on going by the book and fingering Daniels himself." Smith looked out over the water. "And so does the president."

"I thought CURE wasn't supposed to be political."

Smith allowed himself the briefest moment to think about something which was not on his day's agenda. It was a vision of the basement of Folcroft sanitarium. "We can get back to the dock now," he snapped. "This should be an easy assignment."

"Why?"

"Barney Daniels is a dinosaur at the CIA, an old-fashioned agent. He didn't use weapons, even at the peak of his career. You won't have any kind of interference. And he's an alcoholic. He'll be defenseless."

"That's a terrific incentive, Smitty. You really know how to make your employees enthusiastic about their work."