Warren Murphy: Last Rites

By the end of that first decade, a new President had assumed the office and found the tide of lawlessness had only worsened. He had given Smith the broader responsibility of creating an enforcement arm.

Smith had plucked an obscure patrolman with a single tour in Vietnam to his credit-who nevertheless fit an exhaustive list of criteria-and had him killed.

Harold Smith's fingerprints were not on file in the killing of patrolman Remo Williams, the last man executed by the State of New Jersey. He had arranged it all by telephone calls and whispered orders. Others had done the dirty work.

A badge was stolen. A pusher was beaten to death with a baseball bat in an alley in the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey, and when the sun rose, it was Remo Williams's badge that was found at the scene of the crime, Remo Williams who was arrested by Newark detectives, Remo Williams who was rushed through a show trial and found guilty of premeditated murder.

Everyone believed Remo was guilty because everyone knew that the State of New Jersey would not execute one of its own law-enforcement officers unless there was absolutely no shred of doubt. Twelve honest men found Remo Williams guilty, never dreaming they were unwitting participants in a conspiracy that reached all the way to the Oval Office. They only knew that Remo Williams had to die. It was as obvious as the color of the sky.

Remo Williams never understood he had been framed and railroaded through a corrupt justice system. Not until the day after the smothering black leather hood had been jammed over his head and the searing juice poured through his jerking body.

He'd lost consciousness in the death house of Trenton State Prison and woke up in Folcroft Sanitarium, where it was all explained to him by CURE's lone field operative in those days, a one-handed man named Conrad MacCleary.

The chair had been rigged. The trial had been rigged, the jury bought off. His fingerprints and other life records had been pulled from every file.

"Won't work," Remo had said after it was all laid out for him.

"We were thorough," said MacCleary. "You have no family. Few friends-what cop has real friends except other cops?-and the blue brotherhood didn't exactly stand by you here. You were too honest. And honest cops are always the first ones they hang out to dry."

"Still won't work," Remo Williams insisted stubbornly, feeling the bandages on his face from the plastic surgery used to change his appearance.

"Why not?" asked the man with the hook for a hand.

"I grew up in an orphanage. Maybe I don't have a family, but I had a zillion brothers."

"Saint Theresa's burned down two weeks ago. Fortunately, there was only one casualty. A nun. Seems she contracted smoke inhalation or something. Understand you knew her, Williams. Sister Mary something?"

"You bastard."

"You're all alone in the world, Williams. And there's a hobo with no name lying in your grave. Just say the word, and we'll swap you for him and no one will know any different."

Remo Williams had accepted his new life. He had been given over to the last pure-blooded Master of Sinanju and transformed by long training, arduous exercise and monkish diet until he himself was a Master of Sinanju, a martial-arts discipline so old it was said that all other fighting arts were descended from it.

For many years, seeming never to grow older, he had served America in secret. The man who didn't exist working for the the agency that didn't exist. America's enemies wilted before this silent, implacable human weapon.

And now he wanted out. Forever.

But before he got out, Remo was calling in an old obligation from the man who had robbed him of his old life and set him on the new.

The trouble was, Harold Smith had done his job too well so many years ago. Erasing all traces of Remo Williams's existence had been easy compared to erasing other men's existences. Consequently, two decades later, absolutely no trace remained.

The orphanage had burned down to the ground with its scant records. Smith had read Remo's record long ago, before the orphanage was consumed. The skimpy account told of a baby boy, not many weeks old, left in a basket on the doorstep of Saint Theresa's Orphanage. A note attached to the babe's swaddling clothes told his name. Remo Williams. That was all. No explanation. No back trail.

Even Smith's computer file on Remo, maintained over those long years, had been lost when Smith was forced to erase all CURE files during an IRS seizure of the sanitarium in the recent past.

Smith had hit a brick wall. Remo Williams might well have never existed-just as Harold W Smith had intended all along.

Only now Harold W Smith very much wanted to locate Remo Williams's parents. The contract between the CURE and the House of Sinanju was due to be renewed in the coming months. And without Remo, CURE might as well shut down.

The blue contact telephone rang. Smith scooped it up and said, "Yes?"

"Hail, O Emperor of understanding and enlightenment. I crave the boon of your clear-seeing mind," said a squeaky voice.

"Go ahead, Master Chiun."

"Remo is acting strangely."

"More strangely than usual?"

"He received your package."

"It was the best I could do. It is a printout of all US. males whose last name is Williams and whose dates of birth fall within the parameters that would permit them to parent someone Remo's age."

"He threw these names away, unread."

"Why?"

"I do not know why," Chiun said, a testy quality creeping into his tone. "That is why I have called you. Why would these names cease to interest Remo?"

"I have no idea. Last week he appeared very eager when I told him I was compiling such a list."

"Yet now he scorns these names. Scorns the very thing that has obsessed him for many seasons."

"Master Chiun, barring a miracle, I do not believe I can ever locate the information Remo seeks."

"That is good."

"You have expressed those sentiments before."

"And I express them now."

"In the past you made representations suggesting you know something about Remo's past. Something you refuse to divulge."

"I do. Remo is Korean."

"I think that unlikely."

"Remo's father is Korean. Possibly his mother, as well."

"Why do you say that?"

"It is very simple. Remo is outwardly white, but he has taken to Sinanju like no pure-blooded boy of my village ever has. Therefore, he cannot be white. Entirely white. He is Korean. And if he is Korean, his father must be Korean, for it is well-known that Koreanness-true Koreanness-can only be passed from father to son."

"I see," said Harold Smith vaguely, recognizing that the Master of Sinanju had lapsed into the prejudice and superstition of his ancestors.

Smith changed the subject. "What do you suggest we do? The next contract expires in the fall. It is bad enough that Remo considers himself on strike, but once the contract lapses, there is no predicting what he will do."

"Remo must never be allowed to find his father," Chiun said suddenly.

"Why not?"

"Because," said the Master of Sinanju in a strange voice, "if he does, he may never forgive me."

"What do you mean by that?" asked Smith.

But the Master of Sinanju had already hung up. Harold Smith replaced his receiver and turned his chair around to face Long Island Sound. He steepled his fingers as a sour expression settled over his slightly sharp features.

All his life he had traded in information. Hard fact was his currency. On hard fact he made countless life-and-death decisions. Harold Smith believed that like the radio transmissions of his long-ago youth, the facts of Remo's lineage not gone forever, but were speeding through the galaxy. If one could take a radio far enough into deep space, fifty-year-old broadcasts of "The Shadow" and "The Green Hornet" and "I Love a Mystery" could be received as clearly as if it were 1939.