Warren Murphy: The End of the Game

And he would so choose. Unless Remo was removed from the board.

"Think about it, Dr. Smith," Buell had said. "You get rid of that Remo. Or I'll start a nuclear war."

"Why would you do that?" Smith asked placantly. "You'd probably die too in an all-out nuclear war."

Buell had cackled, a madman's laugh. "Maybe and maybe not. But it'd be my war. I'd be the winner because I started it and that was what I set out to do. Five million extra points for starting a nuclear war. It's this Remo or that. Make up your mind."

"I have to think about it," Smith said, stalling for time as his Folcroft computers raced through switching procedures to try to trace the phone call.

"I'll call you tomorrow then," Buell said. "Oh, by the way. Your computers won't be able to trace this call."

"Why not?" Smith asked.

"They haven't had time yet. All they'll know is I'm someplace west of the Mississippi, and that's right. Good-bye."

That had been an hour ago and still Smith sat looking through the smoky windows at the sound. The United States or Remo. Maybe the world or Remo.

When it was that simple, was there any question what his response would be? Sighing, he picked up the telephone to call Chiun.

Marcia tried to make him eat dinner, but Buell curtly told her he was too busy.

World War Ill-- five million points.

Remo-- a half-million points.

Pamela Thrushwell-- fifty thousand points by now.

And now this Dr. Smith? How many points to give him?

He turned on the television monitor's game board and watched the point totals appear on the screen. Smith was a bureaucrat probably, and probably dumb. Arbitrarily, he decided to give Harold W. Smith a mere ten thousand points.

Until further calculation.

In the middle of the hotel-room floor, surrounded by piles of bond paper, Chiun sat.

Smith waited, silent, until Chiun acknowledged his presence but the old Oriental was preoccupied. As Smith watched, Chiun was busy crossing out typewritten lines and writing in other lines, using a quill pen and an old-fashioned inkwell which he had on the floor before him. His tongue stuck slightly out of one corner of his mouth, showing his concentration. His hands flew so rapidly over the paper that to Smith they seemed almost a blur in the dimly lit room. Finally, Chiun sighed and placed the quill pen down, next to the inkwell. The motion was casual but graceful and when he was done, inkwell and pen looked as if they had been sculpted from one piece of black stone.

Without looking up, Chiun said, "Greetings, O Emperor. Your servant apologizes for his ill manners. Had I but known you were here, all else would have been relegated to unimportance. How may I serve you?"

Smith, who knew Chiun's excuse was nonsense since the Oriental would have recognized him a corridor away by the sound of his feet scuffing on a thick carpet, looked at the stacks of paper on the floor.

"Are you writing something?" he asked.

"A poor thing but an honest effort. One in which you may well take pride, Emperor."

"This isn't one of those petitions you got up to Stop Amateur Assassins, is it?" Smith asked warily.

Chiun shook his head. "No. I have decided that the time is not yet right for a national movement dedicated to obliterating inferior work. Someday but not now." He waved a long-nailed hand over the papers. "This is a novel. I am writing a novel."

"Why?"

"Why? Because the world needs beauty. And it is a good way for a man to spend his days, telling what he has learned so he can lighten the burden of those who are yet to come."

"This isn't about you, is it? About us?"

Chiun chuckled and shook his head. "No, Emperor. I understand full well your lust for secrecy. This has nothing to do with any of us."

"What's it about then?" Smith asked.

"It is about a noble old Oriental assassin, the last of his line, and the white ingrate he tries to teach and the secret agency that employs them. A mere trifle."

Suddenly, Smith remembered the bizarre call he had gotten earlier from some publisher who had thought that Folcroft was a training area for assassins. "I thought you said it wasn't about us," Smith said.

"And it is not," Chiun said innocently.

"But a noble old Oriental assassin. His white student A secret agency. Master of Sinanju, that is us," Smith said.

"No, no. Not even superficial similarities," Chiun said. "For instance, this Oriental assassin about whom I write is honored by the country which he has adopted and for which he works. Totally unlike my situation. And the white trainee, well, in my novel, he is not always ungrateful. And he is capable of learning something. Clearly that has nothing to do with Remo."

"The secret agency though," said Smith.

"Never once do I mention the Constitution and how we all work outside the Constitution so that everybody else can live inside it. How we break it so we can fix it." He gave Smith a sly grin. "Although I must confess that once I thought I might use that in my novel, but I realized no one would believe it. It is just too ridiculous to be believable."

"It still sounds a great deal like us," Smith said. "At least on a superficial level."

"You need not worry yourself about that, Emperor. The publisher has recommended certain changes which will dispel your fears. That is what I occupy myself with while Remo is away."

"What kind of changes?" Smith asked.

"Just a few. Everybody loves my manuscript. I just have to make a few changes for Bipsey Boopenberg in Binding and Dudley Sturdley in Accounting."

"What kind of changes?" Smith persisted.

"They assure me if I make these changes that I will become a big star and my book a best-seller. The Needle's Eye by Chiun. I have to change the Oriental assassin into a Nazi spy. The white trainee has to go. In place of the secret organization in America, I have to have Nazi spies in England. And set it in World War II. And I have to have a woman who will save the world from destruction at the hands of that lunatic with the funny mustache. This is all they wanted changed. And then I will be rich."

"You are already rich, Master, in the things that count."

"And you are always kind, Emperor. But there is an old saying in Sinanju. Kindness can warm a soul but it cannot fill an empty belly."

Smith decided to drop the subject of Chiun's novel because he felt a con job coming on to raise Chiun's fees for training Remo. And besides, Chiun was always writing and never publishing, and there was no reason to think this book's fate would be any different.

And maybe none of it would matter anyway. Why worry about it today when it was possible that tomorrow, or just a few tomorrows away, none of them might be alive to worry about anything.

"I understand," Smith said simply. "Master, I come to speak to you about a matter of great importance."

"As important as my novel?" Chiun asked.

"Yes."

"Name your request, sire. It will be done," Chiun said.

"I'm glad you feel that way, Chiun. May I sit down?"

Chiun waved a hand airily toward the sofa. "Please. Be comfortable." He liked the gesture with his hand and repeated it. It would be the gesture he used when he was being interviewed by Time magazine for a cover story. Chiun, Great New Author. He would wave the reporter to a seat with just that gesture, elegant and imperious, but also inviting. He would serve tea to reporters. And read them Ung poetry to show them that his was the soul of a true artist. And he would keep Remo away from them because Remo was impossible, incapable of even the simplest civility, and he would certainly alienate the press. Or, at the very least, he would wind up insinuating himself into the story. Chiun had had enough of people thinking that Remo was important when anyone with any sense should know that Chiun was the important one.