Warren Murphy: The Last Monarch

The flight had been surprisingly peaceful. On their way through the crowded LAX terminal, there were no sudden and mysterious bloody noses or severed ears on anyone they passed. In fact, as they headed off in search of a cab, Chiun even managed a sympathetic smile for a harried young woman hauling two crying children.

His teacher's uncharacteristically placid behavior made Remo intensely uneasy.

Chiun was building to something. The Master of Sinanju was planning to use his time on the West Coast to wreak some sort of terrible vengeance against those who he thought had perpetrated injustices against him. But to Remo's knowledge, there wasn't anybody left for the old Korean to kill.

"Quintly Tortilli is dead, Little Father," Remo reminded Chiun in the cab on the way from LAX to the hospital.

"And rightly so," Chiun replied calmly. "He was a foul-mouthed liar who endangered Emperor Smith's charge, the corpulent marionette. However, that is all water under the bridge."

"We're not stopping by Taurus," Remo warned.

"That studio no longer exists," Chiun answered.

"Neither do Bindle and Marmelstein," Remo suggested, naming the studio chiefs who had betrayed Chiun during the making of his film.

"This is true," Chiun mused. He tipped his head to one side, considering. "Perhaps I will visit their graves to pay my respects."

"You're not going to dig them up and try to kill them again, are you?" Remo asked worriedly. Chiun raised a thin eyebrow.

"Now, Remo, you are being silly."

"Can you blame me?" Remo asked. "Last night, you were ready to tear all of Hollywood a new A-hole. Now you're acting sweeter than a Prozac pixie stick. It's scary as all hell."

"Meet the new me," Chiun announced airily, waving a long-nailed hand. "I am like a duck."

"Short and greasy?"

Chiun frowned at his pupil. "Everything runs off my back," he explained.

"Yeah?" Remo said doubtfully. "We'll see." When they arrived at Weizmann-Teacher's Hospital, they found a gaggle of reporters standing in an unhappy knot in front of the main parking area. Dozens of news vans emblazoned with station call letters blocked the ambulance entrance. Satellite dishes from the network and local news vehicles pointed skyward.

Cables snaked from trucks to videocameras and lights.

Hoping to avoid the newspeople, Remo instructed the cabdriver to drop them off down the street. As the taxi drove away, he and Chiun walked up the sidewalk to the hospital.

Only a few reporters stood before cameras to offer taped digests for hourly news updates. The rest lounged around the area, bored expressions on their plastic-surgery-tightened and makeup enhanced faces.

There were several card games in progress. Smith had been worried that Chiun might call attention to them, but Remo saw as they approached that only a few faces looked in their direction. These quickly turned away in disinterest. A kimono in L.A. just wasn't news.

As Remo and Chiun slipped behind one cameraman, a female reporter was summing up her taped spot.

"Few have shown up here outside the hospital to wait out the end of the former President. No doubt, most have realized the damage his monster deficits and hate mongering caused this nation. The most evil man in American history, or just a misguided old fool? You be the judge. Konchacata Badadada reporting."

She waited a few seconds before dropping her microphone. The woman seemed very pleased with her unbiased work.

As the reporter handed off her microphone to an intern, Remo tapped her cameraman on the shoulder. "Did she just say they're waiting for him to die?" he asked.

"That's what we've been hearing," the cameraman said.

Remo frowned, assuming he'd just wasted his time coming all the way to California to give selective amnesia to someone who was already knocking on death's door.

"Who's saying it," he asked, "the hospital?"

The cameraman shook his head. "Him," he replied, pointing to a spot closer to the main hospital doors.

The Big Three networks had bullied their way to the front of the line as soon as they'd arrived on the scene, staking out the prime reporting real estate. Remo saw a giant A peeking out from one of the parked network vans. The other two letters were obscured by a bizarre-looking man in a dark blue suit and fire-engine-red tie.

He looked half vulture, half Vulcan and all Satan. Demonic eyebrows-painted black-rose at crooked angles above eyes that were twin lasers of focused malice. The mouth was twisted back in a constipated rictus. Worst of all was the hair. The man wore a ghastly jet-black toupee that was so flat it looked as if it had been run through a clothes wringer and secured in place with shellac.

Remo recognized the hairpiece even before he saw the man. Stan Ronaldman. Longtime political reporter for one of the big networks.

While the ex-President inside the hospital was in office, Ronaldman had been the White House correspondent. The reporter had a hatred for the President that was so obvious and so visceral it was almost as if he blamed the chief executive for the genes that had cursed him with his own hairless pate. His infamous bile was on full display as Remo and Chiun approached.

"Isn't he confirmed dead yet?" Ronaldman was complaining to a harried producer.

"There's still a news blackout," the woman replied.

"I think something might have happened." Ronaldman clapped his hands together ecstatically. Dull eyes bugged out over a corpselike smile. "Dead. That's the only explanation," he enthused.

"I'm not sure, Stan," the producer warned. The woman was listening to something on a headset that ran into the open back of the news van. "There's lots of weird radio stuff going back and forth. All kinds of yelling and code words that aren't in any of our source books. I think all those cars that showed up early this morning were Feds or something."

"More government waste," Ronaldman complained, shaking his toupeed head. "He specialized in that." His happiness at the thought of the former President's death shifted to anger, a change in expression so subtle it was barely discernible. "So I suppose now we'll have a big state funeral at taxpayer expense. Why don't we just throw him in a landfill somewhere and spend all that wasted funeral and B-1 bomber money where the people want it? On follicle-stimulation research and sheep-ranch subsidies."

"What's national defense or honoring a beloved political icon when you could be getting mohair aid from Washington?"

"Exactly," Ronaldman enthused. His tight smile returned as he sought out the source of the voice behind him.

The reporter was surprised at the very odd couple he found. One was an Asian who was as old as the hills around Ronaldman's own Arizona sheep ranch. The other was a thin Caucasian in a white T-shirt and black Chinos.

"Is the President okay?" Remo asked, noting the many news vans.

"Ex-President," Ronaldman stressed. "And he's dead. Dead as a five-hundred-dollar Pentagon toilet seat."

"Possibly," his producer cautioned from her post on the van floor. The woman turned away, grateful to have Ronaldman distracted, even if only for a moment.

"Don't listen to Madame de Gloom over there," Ronaldman insisted. "I say he's dead, and I should know. After all, I have been interviewed extensively on the subject by my colleagues in the press."

"Interviewed?" Remo asked. "Aren't you supposed to be reporting on this thing?"

"I have a history with the late former President," Ronaldman replied. "People are interested in what I have to say."

The reporter glanced momentarily at Chiun.

The Master of Sinanju had sidled up to Ronaldman. Hands behind his back, he was standing on tiptoes, the better to see the glistening black wig plastered to the man's skull. He dropped quickly to the soles of his sandals when Ronaldman looked his way. Chiun whistled casually.