Warren Murphy - The Last Alchemist

"Truth," said Remo. "They're fairy tales."

"The histories of Sinanju are what make you and me what we are. They are our past, and our future. They are our strength."

"Then if they are so accurate, why do you want me to lie?"

"Put in your own words, then, what you call truth." Remo glanced at the scroll.

"White. The word you want is 'white.' Do you want me to write it? My characters are not as fine as yours but I will write it. I'm white."

"That's so crude," said Chiun. "Perhaps you can say it with grace. Say, perhaps, that strangers would get a white impression from you but because of the way you have been taught to move and excel you are Korean in essence."

"I'm white," said Remo. "The character sign is 'white.' You know, the pale lake surrounded by the bleaching sticks. Do you want me to write it?"

"I wanted help," said Chiun, "and I got you." He cleaned the quill in pure vinegar and wax-sealed the special ink blended to last millennia for future Masters of Sinanju. He would write no more until the foulness of this betrayal left his spirits. "I can write no more for years. "

"You didn't want to say I was white," said Remo. "Your problem is you have never worked for a real emperor. "

The phone rang and a computer was talking to him.

Remo knew who was behind it. But Smitty, Harold W. Smith, head of the organization, hadn't reached out for him like that in years, partly because Remo had difficulty in working the codes, but also because assignments often required questions and answers. This was an old and cumbersome routine. Remo got the first code right in answering the computer. It was to hit the number one on the touch-tone phone continuously until what at first appeared to be a sales pitch from a computer turned into a responding voice, still not Smith. It instructed him to make sure no one was following him and to proceed to a phone booth in nearby Lansing, Michigan. The code to punch in that phone booth was a continuous two.

It was downtown Lansing and Remo arrived there at night. And after he put in his quarter and punched two continuously, he finally got Smith's voice.

"What's wrong? What's up?"

"You went running across water in front of a television camera today."

"Yes. I did," said Remo.

"Therefore, you threatened to compromise the entire organization."

"I saved a little girl."

"And we're trying to save a country, Remo."

"Right then," said Remo, "I felt the little girl was more important. And do you want to know something? I still do."

"Are you in the mood to help your civilization?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Uranium is being stolen continuously from factories and we cannot stop it. So far, enough uranium to make fourteen atomic bombs is missing. We don't know how they are doing it. All other intellligence agencies are helpless. We're down to you, Remo."

"I never thought I was down, Smitty," said Remo.

"We are a last resort," said Smith. "We have to get you into one of the factories."

"Smitty . . . "

"Yeah."

"If I had it to do over again, I would still save that girl."

"I know," said Smith.

"You know me."

"That's why I said it. Watch yourself."

"What's to watch? I'm always okay."

Across the safe line Remo heard Harold W. Smith clear his throat. Remo did not mention that he would have loved to see Smith's face if the pictures did appear on network TV. Then he would have loved it. Now he felt sort of bad. He felt he had betrayed a trust, a trust to this man and a trust given by a nation.

"I'll watch it," said Remo finally. He said it with anger. He hung up by embedding the plastic receiver into the phone and shattering the booth door as he walked out through it in a shower of wire-reinforced glass.

From across the street it looked as though the telephone booth had exploded the man out of it. It looked that way to the policeman who saw the suspicious-looking stranger who did it. But the longer the cop watched the stranger, the more unsuspicious he became, especially when, just as an angry boy might kick a can, he took a car door off and skimmed it down the street. The policeman then remembered a sudden parking problem in the opposite direction and ran there to write the tickets.

Chapter 3

Harrison Caldwell knew gold. Anyone who trusted anything else was a fool. In times of crisis, people bought gold with their paper and their land and their possessions. And when the price of gold went up, then Caldwell and Sons, est. 1402, goldbrokers to the world, bullionists supreme, would sell gold. It was a nervous time. The paper was called money, but it was based only on people's faith. Eventually all paper came to be worth its weight in wood pulp. When that happened slowly, it was called inflation. When it happened quickly, it was called a collapse.

Selling gold for paper always made the Caldwells nervous. They only held the paper as long as the price of gold was high, waiting for the gold to moderate. That was the kind of patience that brought a man two things he could not have too much of. One was gold; the other was heads on the wall.

"He who hangs his enemy's head on his palace wall may rest his easily for another night."

The Caldwells had operated in the Americas since the sixteenth century, and in New York City since 1701, occupying the same family-owned land near the port for over two hundred years. Later that little street just off Wall Street in the commercial district would be worth millions. But the Caldwells knew that land, too, had flaws. Land was only worth what people said it was worth; therefore, it was nearly as weak an investment as paper. And as for ownership, armies decided who owned what land. Nobody ever stopped an invasion with a silly little piece of paper called a deed.

Only gold was of value forever. When the Caldwells had lost everything once in Europe, they escaped with only the knowledge that gold endured, and tales of a great stone that someday one of their descendants might discover again. "Gold," they had told every firstborn son, "begins and ends every hope of man. With enough gold, anything you want will be yours."

And now Harrison Caldwell was going to own more of it than anyone. The pictures of the stone and the translation from the old alchemist's symbols were safely locked in the Caldwell depository in a major New York City bank. The dead, of course, were dead, and therefore completely safe. While their heads didn't hang on palace walls to give warning, they would keep their silence more certainly than a promise from a saint's lip.

It was Harrison Caldwell's own personal wonderful day. He left the sedate offices of Caldwell and Sons, bullionists, happy, receiving awestruck recognition from the line of secretaries leading to the front door.

"Mr. Caldwell," each would say, and Harrison Caldwell would nod. Sometimes he would see a flower on a desk out of place, or a fingernail bitten. Though he would not say anything to the offending secretary herself, he would mention it later to an assistant. The secretary would then be reminded to mend her ways.

The wages were relatively low, the demands precise and unmovable, and despite what every labor-relations counselor would call a throwback to the Stone Age, Caldwell and Sons had a turnover rate of virtually nil, while those corporations with "enrichment programs" and "employee feedback forums" and psychological tests had the pass-through rate of a subway turnstile.

Caldwell and Sons did not have employee feedback forums and the employees knew why: they were not the chums of the Caldwells, nor were they partners in an enterprise. They were employees. In that respect they would be paid on time, given clear work, not overworked one day or idled the next. They could advance in pay as their skills advanced. There was something about working at Caldwell and Sons that was reassuring.