Warren Murphy - Last Drop

There was no click this time. The floor beneath the bed just opened up and swallowed Remo whole.

As he fell, he heard two glasses thump above him as they hit the carpeted floor.

"You promised you would not touch my room!" Esmeralda shrieked. "You promised!"

The bed hit a surface that felt like rock, splintering the wooden frame of the bed in a crackle of noise. Remo bounced high on the mattress, extending himself as far as he could, but he wasn't able to reach high enough to grasp the broken floorboards several stories above him, where Esmeralda's face gazed down at him in horror.

"Oh, Dio, what have we done?" she cried. Her words echoed down the narrow stone-paved column where Remo was trapped.

And then a metallic whirr sounded above him, and a flat sheet of metal moved slowly to cover the opening at the top of the column.

Esmeralda's face disappeared as the opening between them was sealed. There was no more light after that, no more sound.

?Chapter Twelve

Smith opened his eyes with difficulty. He was in another hospital room, all antiseptic white. Chiun stood beside him.

"Where are we?" Smith croaked, motioning toward a water glass. Chiun gave him a drink.

"We are at Folcroft Sanitarium, Emperor, as you requested."

"Not as a patient!" Smith coughed.

"Do not be troubled. The sanitarium staff does not recognize you. I have made inquiries. They know that the name of their director is Smith, but none has ever seen him. They feel the elusive Dr. Harold Smith has little to do with the operation of this worthy institution."

"They're right," Smith said. "They wouldn't know my face."

"Exactly. It was for that reason that I signed you in under a false name."

"What name?"

Chiun smiled. "A common name. A name so ordinary that it will arouse no suspicion whatever. The most widespread of names."

"What is it?"

"Wang."

"I see," Smith said. "Well, be that as it may, I have to get to the office." He strained to pull himself up, but Chiun stopped him.

"No, Emperor. You are wounded, and you must rest. You are no longer young, and unlike me, your body is in a state of degeneration, o most understanding and enlightened being." He bowed formally in apology.

"No one knows that better than I do, Chiun, but I must return to my office at once. There are procedures you don't understand—"

Chiun interrupted. "While it is possible to live as many years as I have and still be ignorant of all around one, it is difficult."

Smith passed a long moment looking into the expressionless hazel eyes. "Then you know?"

Chiun spoke softly. "I know that you are not the emperor of this land, but of a society within this land whose secrecy is so necessary that, rather than risk its discovery, it would be destroyed."

Smith remained silent, listening.

"I know that you are part of this society, and that my pupil, Remo, is also part. I believe that you carry evidence of this society with you in the case that is ever in your hands. When I found you, you were without the case. Therefore, I believe you wish to return to your office in order to destroy yourself."

Smith rubbed his eyes tiredly. "It has to be done," he said. "You understood when I first hired you to train Remo that... that certain steps were to be performed if necessary."

Chiun remembered. The one command he was obliged to obey was the order to kill Remo. If CURE was destroyed, then everything associated with it would have to be eliminated. Smith would obliterate all the tangible evidence of the organization himself. The computers would burn to the ground in the special asbestos-lined executive offices at Folcroft. And a coffin in the basement of the sanitarium had been waiting, prepared with a poison capsule, for years. Waiting for Harold W. Smith.

But Chiun had created Remo, transformed him from a normal man into the exceptional being he was, and it was Chiun's duty to destroy his creation. Of the three, only Chiun was to live. He was to return to the village of Sinanju in Korea and live out the rest of his days in peace. By then, the massacre would be over.

"I understand," Chiun said. "But you must wait for Remo. He may have information. Perhaps we can retrieve your case."

"Remo may not be alive," Smith said. "Someone's been following him, trying to kill everyone he's come in contact with, including me. The killer knows about Remo."

"I also know about Remo," Chiun said cryptically. "He is alive."

Smith puzzled the statement over in his mind briefly, then gave up. "How?"

"In the discipline of Sinanju, the development of the body is but a small part. The art of my village is different from the other so-called martial arts because in it, one's strength rises from within. The body, the mind, the spirit— all are one."

Smith stared at him blankly. "Yes?"

"I would know if Remo died, just as I would know if one of my limbs dropped off, or if one of my organs ceased to function."

Smith nodded dubiously. "We can't wait until it's too late," he said. "CURE can't risk any exposure. Any whatever."

"How late is too late?"

Smith reached for his spectacles at his bedside. Adjusting them, he studied the clock whirring quietly beside the table lamp.

9:42 P.M. It annoyed Smith to know that the clock was probably inaccurate, but he had left his watch in the hospital room in Washington.

"It's between nine and ten o'clock," he grumbled. "It may already be too late, if Remo has tried to call me here. And unless the thieves are complete cretins, by tomorrow they'll know that the portable phone is hooked up to the president's office."

"Midnight, then. We will wait until midnight for Remo."

"In my office. Not here."

"Very well." Chiun stretched his long fingers toward Smith's neck.

"What are you doing?"

"Rest, Emperor. Your command will be obeyed."

Smith didn't want to sleep. But the old Oriental's fingers seemed to trigger something in Smith's nervous system that sent waves of euphoria through his brain. Suddenly, there was no more need for conversation. All that mattered had already been spoken. He felt himself drifting off, the thoughts beginning to jumble in his mind. The case. The gloved hand. The terrible destruction that was to come.

When he awoke again, he was in his office, propped up in his chair by pillows. Chiun had somehow carried him there without so much as disturbing his sleep. But Smith had long since ceased to be amazed by the old man's abilities.

"Are you in discomfort, o Emperor?"

"I'm fine," Smith said.

He waited. And while he waited, he could almost hear death rushing toward him.

The discipline of Sinanju, as Chiun told Smith, was more than the development of the body. How much more, he could never explain to any man who not only allowed himself to be struck by a bullet, but whose very existence depended on the use of a telephone.

Chiun retired to a far corner of the office, as distant from the four computers as possible.

For Smith, the Folcroft computers were infallible, precise, perfect. But for Chiun, they were no more than machines, the emperor's toys, not to be trusted. Their artificial brains, made of tape and wire and droplets of molten metal, revolted him. They did not work the way that a brain was supposed to work. They collected information and regurgitated it on command. To Chiun and all the Masters of Sinanju who went before him, that was the smallest and most insignificant function of the human mind.

Chiun believed that the mind, with its labyrinthine possibilities and awesome power, held the force of the universe. Even ordinary minds, the dissipated, ignominious minds of the fat white people whom Smith's machines served, could create cities out of the air in the heat of the desert. They called these creations mirages, visions, dreams. They deemed them of no consequence and so were unable to enter and explore them.