Warren Murphy: Lost Yesterday

This man was a professor of international relations. His name was Waldo Hunnicut. He had once been an ambassador to an Arab country where he used his ambassadorship to attack America's policy in the Middle East, so therefore, according to the announcer, he spoke from a respected position.

Remo threw the beer glass at the face of Hunnicut and the bar exploded in applause. The television just exploded.

“How can these guys get away with that crap?” he asked.

“What can you do? They're all like that on television. You don't have a choice,” said the man next to Remo.

The vision now told Remo that everything changed but Sinanju.

“No,” said Remo to the vision. “I love my country.”

To this the vision got quite angry, said it had given the best years of its life to Remo and Remo was unappreciative, ungrateful, and totally undeserving of all that the vision had given him.

“What have you given me?”

“More than I should,” came back the voice, and then he vision wasn't talking to him anymore. The vision was insulted.

Remo didn't know how one insulted a vision. But then again, he never had a vision before. He was close to where he was raised, close to the orphanage in Newark.

He took a cab there, and was surprised to see no white people around. He had remembered a mix of everyone, but now there was no mix.

“How long has Newark been black?” asked Remo.

“Where you been, boy?” asked the black driver.

“Away.”

“Then let me give you some friendly advice. And I do mean friendly. You don't want your ass around here too long.”

“I'll be all right,” said Remo. How did he know he would be all right? He didn't have a gun. Yet he knew he wasn't in danger, no matter who came after him.

He smelled the odor of garlic and onions, felt the nauseating oily mixture move out across his pores. Somehow he knew he was now able to hold on, perhaps even get better.

The orphanage was gone. The block was gone. The neighborhood was gone. It was as though someone had bombed it.

Windows were smashed. Pipes were left hanging out of buildings where someone had tried to remove them. Graffiti littered the walls. Rats and garbage covered alleys.

Four black toughs ambled up to him, all wearing jackets indicating they were from some organization called the Righteous Skulls. They demanded tribute from him for standing on their sidewalk. They wanted to know what was in the briefcase.

Remo did not attempt to reach a dialogue of understanding. He slapped the teeth out of the one closest to him, sending the slash of white across the ebony countenance, sailing like Chiclets clattering lightly across the sidewalk. The smile was gone.

“I don't like to be threatened,” said Remo.

Three swore they weren't threatening, and the fourth was nodding as he looked for his teeth. He had heard they could be replaced by modern medicine.

“What happened to the orphanage here?”

“Gone, man, can't you see?”

“And Sister Mary Elizabeth. Any of you heard of her? Or Coach Walsh at Weequaic High School? Any of you heard of them?”

They hadn't.

“Okay. Sorry about the teeth. I didn't know I hit that hard,” said Remo, opening the suitcase and giving each young hood a hundred dollars.

“That's a lot of bread there, man. You'd better watch out. You want some muscle to wear?”

“I don't need muscles,” said Remo. Now, that was absurd. Of course he needed his muscles. But then there was the vision again telling him muscles weren't man's strength. It was his mind that made power.

“I thought you weren't talking to me,” Remo said to the vision. The toughs stared at the crazy man talking to himself.

“I want to keep you alive, not company,” said the vision. And then the vision went on about bad habits, a lifetime of bad habits Remo had acquired growing up with whites.

Whites, thought Remo. That was funny, he could have sworn he was white.

He did not know it, but he was heading for the one place that might force Harold W. Smith to disband the organization, the one place he had always avoided when he had his full memory. If Harold W. Smith had known about Remo's direction, he might have taken the little cyanide capsule he always carried with him, and before swallowing it, put all the organization's vast computer network into self-destruct. Because Remo, without a memory, was going to open up the secret of his own murder.

Harold W. Smith, who dealt with disasters daily, had a formula. He would have been dead by now if he didn't know how to handle them, and the organization would have collapsed in the first week.

The secret to handling a disaster was not to run from it or wildly run to it. The way to handle the enormity was to first number it. A number gave a sense of proportion. If you were going to die in a week, that was a tragedy. But if the entire world was going to be destroyed in an afternoon, that was a greater tragedy.

Harold W. Smith had placed the President's viability as number one, just because he had such power under his control. But the danger of the amnesia formula was a close second. An entire city was gone, undoubtedly because of the Dolomos and the formula. The scientific reports got worse every day, it seemed. Sometimes the formula for some strange reason would lose power. Other times it would increase in potency.

And then came Remo, and the destruction of the organization if he, and it, should be compromised. The question that presented itself to Harold W. Smith at this time was that if the country were in danger of being destroyed, what difference would it make if the knowledge of its secret organization were exposed? Wouldn't it be better for Smith to stay alive and help?

It was a time to search his own motives. The desire to live was always there, no matter how old a person got. If he and the organization were gone, then the idea that a constitutional democracy could work would still exist. The President could always surrender to the Dolomos to buy time. But he could not surrender the idea of a constitutional democracy. If that were gone, it would be gone forever. There would be calls for a police state when things got too chaotic, a return to the force employed by Remo and Chiun, but this time openly.

It was a hard decision, but Harold W. Smith was used to making hard decisions. If they were compromised, he decided, he would still take his own life and destroy his computer network, which made the organization.

As he was labeling the disasters, it struck him that if Remo remembered the phone number, what else did he remember? Did he remember being framed so that he could be publicly executed, thus removing his fingerprints from any files anywhere, removing the idea of the man? Did he remember getting that plastic surgery on his face? Did he remember he was once a Newark cop? And if he were to return to his old precinct, would anyone recognize a dead man?

What if they began to look into a state execution that failed? And would this dead man with the new face be recognized in hundreds of places where he had operated in his extraordinary manner? The whole disaster was ready to go the moment Remo returned to where he used to work. If he returned there. Only Chiun might know what Remo's mind and body would do now. Smith had to find out. He went to the small room provided for him in the White House.

Smith never knew when Chiun slept. He never slept at the same hour, and he had seen him and Remo stay awake for longer periods than the human mind was supposed to be able to tolerate.

He knocked on Chiun's door.

“Is it time?”

“No, Master of Sinanju. I would like to speak to you.”

“Enter.”

Chiun sat in a lotus position in dark gray robes, his long fingernails concealed under the folds of the cloth.