Warren Murphy: The End of the Game

It was the best suggestion they had heard all morning. Remo thought it was pretty good too. Especially the part about the hell out of here.

He was in Atlanta by the next sunrise, in the penthouse of the Peachtree Plaza Hotel, trying to remember the tune he had been whistling the day before in the Iranian barrens.

He thought he had done rather well. He liked the mystical part. He had always had trouble with the mystical part, but this time it had all worked.

"Well?" came a squeaky voice from the main room of the suite.

"Went fine," Remo called back. "Like a charm. Everything you said."

He heard a slight expelling of air, and then, "Of course it went well."

"I didn't think it would go that well. The legend part and everything."

Remo entered the living room of the suite. A frail wisp of a man sat in a glittering yellow morning kimono. Frail strands of white hair circled his parchmented Oriental face like a halo. His stringy beard quivered as he spoke.

"I told you what to do," he said. "I was clear. Was I not clear?"

"Oh, yeah," Remo said. "You were clear. But you know, you kept referring to Iran as Persia and talked about the old Shahs and how they honored the House of Sinanju, and, well, you know."

"I may not know, but I am finding out," said Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, teacher of Remo, and one who had detected once again that first smoke from the fire of ingratitude.

"You Were right," Remo said. "The legends are still there, about Sinanju and the old Shahs. Still there."

"And why wouldn't they still be there?" asked Chiun, his voice flat and cold like the first ice covering of a winter pond.

"Right," said Remo. "Right you are."

"Very wrong," said Chiun. "Very wrong you are. I have given the best years of an assassin's life to the training of a white, and still he is surprised that what I tell him is so. Surprise? Are you surprised when the cold does not cut or the world slows for your eyes? Are you surprised when your hand is one with the force that the universe intended man to have?"

"No, Little Father," Remo said softly.

"And yet the glory of Sinanju, the days when the great House of Assassins was properly honored by civilized nations, surprises you. Persians remember their assassins. Americans remember nothing, especially not gratitude."

"I am very grateful to you, Little Father, for all you have taught me," Remo said.

"You're the worst of whites," said Chiun.

"When it comes to knowing what is, there is no match for you," Remo said. "I have never questioned that. Not once."

"The French are acceptable although they do not wash. The Italians, yes, even Italians are acceptable although their breath is foul. Even the British. But I was cursed with an American student. A hybrid white. And yet I gave without stint or complaint. Your lunatic government contracted for my services and then gave me a thing like you to turn into an assassin. I should have returned home. I would have been justified. I could simply have said this pale piece of pig's ear is much too ugly to allow in my presence and I could have walked away from you and this imbecilic country of yours. But instead I stayed and I trained you. And what do I get? Ingratitude. Surprise that what I say is true."

"All I'm saying," Remo said, "is that the old legends tend to get a bit, well, glorified."

"Of course. How else could one treat the awesome magnificence of the glory of the House of Sinanju?" Chiun asked.

Remo sat down in front of Chiun. The old man turned within his yellow robes. He turned so that he faced away.

"Little Father," Remo said to the back of Chiun's head. "I respect what the House of Sinanju is because I have Sinanju. I am part of it. But the rest of the world doesn't have quite that high opinion of assassins. And that Sinanju was remembered in Iran after centuries was gratifying-- yeah, gratifying." Remo liked that. He thought he had really come out of that one well.

Chiun was quiet a moment. And then he turned. Remo had done it. He was so surprised that he couldn't quite remember if it were the first time Chiun had ever responded to his reasoning and his apology. He would have to remember how he did it. He felt quite confident and he smiled.

"Did you remember heads like melons on the ground or did you just say fruit?" Chiun asked.

"I got to melons," Remo said.

"You forgot melons," said Chiun, and a bony finger with a long tapering nail came out from the robe and rose toward the ceiling of the penthouse suite of the Peachtree Plaza. Chiun was making a point.

"If you had listened well, you would have remembered the melons. You would have remembered heads littering the fields like melons. You would have performed better. But why should I be listened to? It is impossible to teach someone who thinks he knows everything."

"Of course I don't know everything," Remo protested.

"Well, I do," Chiun said. And on that he contended that Remo should listen to everything in the future, as he should have been listening in the past.

Chiun was not the only problem with the Iran assignment. There was a message waiting for Remo at the desk of the hotel. Aunt Catherine had called. Therefore Remo was to phone the coded number that would automatically scramble from both ends.

It was answered far north in a sanitarium overlooking Long Island Sound. Headquarters.

"Where have you been? Remo, the White House is desperate. We promised them protection for the next crucial month and then you disappear."

"They have it," Remo said. "They have the best protection."

"Remo, the White House had to publicly ring itself with concrete barricades to stop truck bombers. That's an international admission of weakness. But we know there are suicide groups aimed at the President's life. We can't stop them with normal security. We had your assurance that the President would be protected. Where are you?"

"Home, or whatever passes for it this week."

"What about the protection?"

"The President's got the best kind," Remo said.

"He doesn't see you. Where is his protection?"

"Because he can't see it doesn't mean he doesn't have it."

"Please don't get Oriental with me, Remo. We have a problem here of Iranian suicide squads who have vowed to kill the President."

"Smitty," Remo said patiently. "Don't worry about those things, will you? It's taken care of."

Dr. Harold W. Smith found himself looking at the telephone now when he talked to Remo. If Remo said it was taken care of, it was taken care of, and that was that and Smith wanted to get off the telephone. Keeping a phone line open longer than he had to extended the risk, scrambler or no scrambler, and Smith found himself worrying more and more these days about the security of the secret organization, CURE.

In his years as the head of CURE, Harold W. Smith had grown old. His hands were not as steady nor his movements as quick. Even his mind had dulled somewhat. But what really had grown old was his spirit. He was tired.

Maybe it was because when the organization began, there was so much hope. A secret agency to work outside the Constitution to fight America's enemies. Someday, a crime-free society. It was a grand goal, but it had never been reached. CURE struggled all the time, just to stay even, and when they had added Remo as their enforcement arm, to punish those who somehow the law missed, it was all just more of the same. More treading water. It wasn't progress, just survival, and it had made Smith a tired old man who worried too much.

But in all those years, not once had Remo told Smith something was taken care of when it wasn't.

"All right," Smith said. "I'll tell him."

He put down the telephone and looked through the one-way windows of Folcroft Sanitarium. The Long Island Sound was churning with dark clouds overhead and the winds whipped silly sailboats toward shore where they should have been an hour before. Smith's mouth felt dry and he looked at his hand. It had age spots. Remo's teacher was old, but he never seemed to get any older. And Remo hadn't seemed to age a day. But Smith had. Yet what worried him was not that his body was aging but that his mind was aging faster. He was slipping.