Warren Murphy - The End of the Game

"We are facing a nuclear holocaust," Smith said.

"That's been going on for forty years now," Remo said, "and all we've had are little wars. If anything, the nukes are keeping the peace."

"They might not be now," Smith said. "Somebody seems to be destabilizing things and we're not sure how or why."

"How do you know this?" Remo asked.

"Just computer hints that our equipment has picked up. Somebody trying to get close to nuclear personnel in America and Russia. Someone or something tapping into lines and codes and information storage. It's like a picture made up of dots. No dot means anything by itself, but all together, they make a picture."

"An awesome picture," Chiun agreed amiably.

"What do you want from me?" Remo asked.

"Find out what's going on."

"I hate machines. I'm lost with them. I can't even work those scrambler devices you gave me."

"They were only two buttons," Smith said.

"Right," said Remo. "Two buttons, and I never could remember which was which. I don't need that stuff."

"Remo, the whole world could go up," Smith said.

"Aieee," Chiun wailed. "We face doom together, O Emperor," said Chiun. His long fingernails were symbols of doom, pointing toward the penthouse ceiling.

"I think Chiun grasps what is going on, Remo. This may be the end of the world. We send one investigator and then another and then another and all these people from all these agencies somehow stop working. They get locked out. They get killed. They get bought off. They go insane. It's a monster of a force and we might be already in the middle of a countdown to a war."

"A countdown? That doesn't mean anything. When you need me to stop someone from pressing a button, then call me," Remo said.

"Disaster," intoned Chiun. "Doom of world and empire."

"Remo. Chiun understands this," Smith said.

"Right," said Remo. He turned on his side on the couch so his back was to Smith.

In tones of grave import, Chiun spoke to Remo in Korean:

"Fool, do you not know that every emperor's sneeze is the end of the world? Emperors think only like that. They are like young women to whom all trivia makes the world hang in the balance. The wrong dessert for lunch is the end of the world to an emperor. Remember always. Never tell an emperor the truth. He would not know what to do with it and probably would resent it gravely. Make believe what he says is important."

Remo answered also in the Korean he had learned:

"It's not like that, Chiun. Smith doesn't get alarmed about small things. I just don't care anymore. We're always going to have a big war, every day you hear it, and we never have one."

"Pretend it is important," Chiun responded. "This lunatic is the emperor."

"He's not an emperor," Remo said. "Just because you work for him doesn't make him an emperor. He's a hired hand and he works for the President and I don't believe in lying to him."

"An assassin who will not lie to an emperor is an assassin whose village goes hungry."

"Sinanju isn't going hungry and hasn't been for three centuries," Remo said. Sinanju in North Korea was Chiun's native village. For centuries, its people had been supported by the labors of the Masters of Sinanju, creators of all the martial arts and the world's greatest assassins. Chiun was the latest in the line.

"Sinanju has not gone hungry because it has had Masters of Sinanju who have served it well and faithfully," Chiun snapped in Korean. "You are not dealing with some new two-hundred-year-old country your ancestors just stumbled over. You are defending Sinanju itself."

"Little Father, I've seen Sinanju. It's a mud village. C'mon. The only thing that ever came out of that dump was the assassins who supported it. Every one of those people are lazy incompetent slobs. You wouldn't have trained me if they weren't."

"You have an ungrateful tongue for someone who didn't even remember melons on the ground."

"How long am I going to hear that?"

"Until you remember," said Chiun, and then to Smith, "He understands the gravity of it now."

"I hope you do, Remo, because we don't know where to turn. We have only you."

Remo rolled onto his other side on the couch and released a large sigh. He looked at Smith and said, "Okay. Will you go through it again please?"

Smith described the defense networks of Russia and the United States in terms as simple as those of a children's book. The two nuclear powers had big guns ready to go boom. These were atomic weapons. But they were very dangerous. They could cause a war that would destroy the world, so, unlike swords and guns, these weapons could harm the users themselves. Therefore, the two powers had to have things that prevented the big guns from going boom as well as devices to make them go boom. Triggers and antitriggers.

Now someone was fooling around with the triggers and the antitriggers. Was that clear?

"Sure. Point me to those trigger things and I'll find out who has them and I'll nail them. Okay?" said Remo.

"Well, it's not that simple," Smith said. "It's not like triggers on a gun."

"I didn't think it would be. Nothing with you is ever simple. Where do I go then?"

"There is a computer center in downtown New York City. Somehow it is involved with this thing. Money seems to be coming from there somehow and occasionally it turns up as part of a transmission link that we intercept."

"All right," Remo said disgustedly. "Where's the computer center?"

Smith gave him the address and explained the problem again in terms of a shelf loaded with canned goods that was being held up above the world with very light supports. The supports were designed both to collapse and not to collapse.

"And someone's trying to make the supports not to collapse collapse," Remo said.

"You have it," Smith said.

"Not really," said Remo. "It sounds like a job for Abbott and Costello to me."

"He only jests," said Chiun quickly. "You have no need to hire this Apple and Cosletto. Remo is ready to do your bidding. One who has been trained by the Master of Sinanju need only hear his emperor's desires, and then will deliver them to him."

"Is that right, Remo?"

"How the hell should I know?" Remo said. Remo had lost the address of the computer center. He knew he had put it somewhere. He might have torn it up also. Addresses were like that.

Before he left, Smith asked the exact nature of the defense of the President against the Iranian truck bombers.

"The best defense against an attacker is in the attacker's mind. It is not the real defense but what he thinks is the defense," Remo said.

"I don't understand. We have suicide truck bombers. What sort of danger is death to someone who wants to lose his life?"

"How can I explain? You only understand them through what you fear. All right. They will kill themselves, but only under certain circumstances, and I've changed the circumstances." He saw blankness on Smith's face and said, "Let me try it this way. Every weapon, for its danger, has a weakness. The sharper the point, the thinner the blade at that point, right?"

"Yes. I think so. What does that have to do with your protection of the President?"

"What makes these people willing to die is also their weakness. You have to get into their beliefs and make them work against them. Do you see?"

"You convinced them it was morally wrong?" Smith asked.

"No. Listen. It may not be popular in some dippy classroom to say it, but life is cheap there. They don't think of a human life with the same respect, let's say, that we do. It's just a fact of life for these people. Hell, they bury half their children before they're eight and if they didn't they couldn't feed them anyhow."

"What are you saying, Remo?"

"I'm saying I scared the shit out of them," Remo said.