Warren Murphy: Blue Smoke and Mirrors

OSI Agent Robin Green sat in the flight security controller's office, her arms folded over her torn blouse. No one would let her change, even though as far as anyone knew, she outranked most of the officers. She shivered. In the next chair, Airman Risko cast quick, hunted glances in her direction.

"We're in pretty deep, aren't we?" he muttered.

"Worse than you think. I haven't told them about the car battery yet."

2

His name was Remo, and all he wanted was to enjoy a Saturday-afternoon ballgame.

Remo sat on a tatami mat in the middle of the bare living-room floor in the first house he had ever truly owned. The big projection TV was on. Remo enjoyed the projection TV because his eyes were so acute that he had to concentrate hard not to see the scanning lines change thirty times each second. This was a new high-definition TV. Its scanning lines changed sixty times a second.

It was a legacy of years of training in the art of Sinanju, the sun source of the martial arts. One of the many downsides he had come to tolerate.

Remo thought it was ironic that the more attuned his mind and body became to the physical universe, the more trouble he had with manmade technology. He first recognized that this could be a problem when, in the early years of his training, he did a harmless thing. He happened to eat a fast-food hamburger.

Remo nearly died of monosodium-glutamate poisoning.

After that, he found it hard to watch movies. He had never thought much about how film worked before- how the illusion of action was created by light shining through the rapidly moving picture frames. Movies, of course, did not actually move. They just seemed to,

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much the way old flip-action book drawings appeared to move when the pages were fanned. The human eye read the changing images as action.

Remo's more-than-human eyes read them as a series of stills. Only the sound was uninterrupted. Over the years, Remo had learned to adjust his vision so that movies still moved for him, but the concentration required sometimes gave him eyestrain.

Television was the same. The pixels-the tiny phosphorescent dots of light which changed every one-thirtieth of a second-created the illusion of moving images. In fact, it was a lot like movies, which changed at a mere twenty-four frames a second, and Remo had to learn to adjust to that phenomenon too. Sometimes he could see the pixels change, line by line, on old TV's. It was distracting.

He didn't have quite as hard a time with high-definition TV's.

And so he sat down with a bowl of cold unseasoned rice and a glass of mineral water, to enjoy the national pastime. He looked like any American on this Saturday afternoon. He was a lean young man of indeterminate age, with chiseled but not too handsome features set off by high cheekbones. His brown eyes were hard as brick chips. His chinos were gray and his T-shirt was white.

Millions of other Americans had their eyes glued to millions of TV sets across America on this ordinary day. Remo liked to think he was one of them. He was not. Officially, he no longer existed. Unofficially, he was the sole enforcement arm for CURE, the superse-cret government agency created to fight crime and injustice outside of constitutional restrictions. Professionally, he was an assassin.

It was a peaceful day in early autumn. The leaves had only started to turn brown and gold outside the windows of his suburban Rye, New York, neighborhood. The air was crisp, and Remo had left the win-

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dows open so he could hear the last birds of summer twitter and cheep.

A pleasant afternoon.

He knew it was not going to last when the familiar padding of sandals came from one of the bedrooms.

"What is it you are watching, Remo?" a squeaking voice asked. There was a querulous undertone to the question. Remo wondered if he had disturbed the Master of Sinanju's meditation. No, he recalled, Chiun usually meditated in the morning. Chiun had trained him in Sinanju, making him, first, more than human, and ultimately the sole heir to a five-thousand-year-old house of assassins, the first white man ever to be so honored.

"Baseball," Remo said, not looking up. No way was Chiun going to ruin this day. No way. "It's Boston versus New York."

"I knew it would come to this," Chiun said sagely. "Though you often spoke with pride of America's two-hundred-year history, I knew it could not last. It is a sad thing when an empire turns on itself. I will pack for us both. Perhaps the Russians will have use for our mighty talents."

"What on earth are you talking about?" Remo asked.

"This. Intercity warfare. A terrible thing in any age. Who is winning?"

"New York. And it's not warfare, Little Father. It's a game."

"A game? Why would you watch such a thing?" asked Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju. He was an elderly Korean with the bright hazel eyes of a child.

"Because I'm a masochist," Remo said, knowing the humor would be lost on the man who had trained him to such a state of human perfection that he was reduced to subsisting on rice and focusing all his attention in order not to see the pixels change.

"Is this the game all Americans watch?" demanded Chiun, whose parchment features were hairless but for

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thin wisps of hair clinging to his chin. Two cottonlike puffs adorned his tiny ears.

"Yep," Remo replied. "The national pastime."

"I think I will watch it with you," said the Master of Sinanju. He settled at Remo's elbow like a falling leaf. Except that a leaf would make a sound hitting the floor. Ghiun did not.

Remo noticed that Chiun wore his chrysanthemum-pink kimono. He tried to remember why that was significant.

"You were so quiet in there I thought you were busy," Remo remarked.

"I was writing a poem. Ung, of course."

"Uh-huh," Remo said. And he understood. Chiun was writing poetry and Remo had interrupted with his baseball. Well, Remo had as much right to watch baseball as Chiun had to write poetry. If Chiun expected total silence, then he could go outside and do it under the trees. Remo was watching this game.

"I have just completed the 5,631st stanza," Chiun said casually as his face screwed up. He, too, had to focus so as not to see the pixels change.

Remo took a sip of water. "Almost done, huh?"

"I may be almost done when I come to the 9,018th stanza. For this is a complicated Ung poem. It describes the melting of the snowcap on Mount Paektusan."

"Korean mountains aren't easy to describe, I'm sure," Remo said politely. No way, he vowed silently. He was watching this game.

"You are very astute. Tell me, I am curious about this ritual which fascinates whites so. Explain it to me, my son."

"Couldn't we wait until it's over? I'd like to enjoy it."

"I would like to enjoy my declining years," Chiun said sharply. "But I was forced to come to this strange land and train a white man in the art Of Sinanju. 1 could have declined. I could have said, no, I will not.

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And had I been so selfish, you, Remo Williams, would not be what you are now. Sinanju."

The memories came flooding back. Fragments of Remo's past life danced in his head. His youth as an orphan. Vietnam. Pounding a beat in Newark. Then, the arrest, trial, and his execution in an electric chair for a murder that was not his doing. It was all part of a frame engineered by Dr. Harold W. Smith, the head of CURE. It provided CURE with the perfect raw material, a man who didn't exist. Chiun's training had provided the rest. He shut out the memories. It had been long ago. These were happier days.

Remo sighed.

"Okay," he said, putting down his rice. "See the guys in the red socks? Those are the Red Sox. That's their name on the screen."

" 'Socks' is not spelled with an X," Chiun pointed out.