Warren Murphy: Killer Chromosomes

Remo made a mental bet with himself. The bet was three to one he would not reach upstairs correctly.

A man with a blue snap-brimmed hat and eyeglasses was using the phone. He carried a cane over his arm.

"Sir," said Remo. "I'm in sort of a rush. Would you let me use the phone, please?"

The man shook his head. He said to someone on the other end of the line to go ahead, he was in no hurry.

Remo hung up for him. He wedged the head and the hat between phone box and wall. The eyeglasses popped up to the man's eyebrows. He grunted. He could not make clear sounds because his jaw was wedged open. He sounded like he was in a dentist's chair.

Remo dialed the number, waited for two rings, hung up and dialed again. He was sure it wasn't going to work.

"Yes," came the acidic voice. It had worked.

Remo unwedged the man's head.

"Sorry," he said. "You're going to have to hobble away. I need privacy. I didn't think I'd reach my party, but you know, I did. Thanks."

He gave the man back his cane and told him to work his jaw and the pain would go away.

"Who was that?" asked the voice on the other end of the line. The voice was that of Harold W. Smith, head of CURE, and to Remo, a man who worried too much about too many things.

"Somebody who got his head caught between the phone and a wall."

"This is not the sort of conversation that should be carried on in public."

"I'm alone. He's gone."

"Did you kill him?"

"What is this? C'mon. What's the message?"

"You might not want to leave so many bodies around."

Remo quickly scribbled on a pad. This new system for messages was supposed to have been simplified so that he could understand it. By transposing words instead of letters and every word at a different integer on his card, to be translated into another word, he was now supposed to be able to get quickly and easily a coded message that no one else could interpret.

He had the card and his pencil out, along with a piece of notepaper.

He put the message together.

"What do you want me to do in Albuquerque?"

"That wasn't the message," said Smith. "Here is the message."

"Jerk," mumbled Remo.

"Blue bellies Boston Globe 19 and Zebra. Got it?"

"Yep," said Remo.

"Does it make sense?"

"Not at all," said Remo. "Not even slightly."

"All right. Fifty-four dancers break three dowels."

"Gotcha," said Remo. "I'll be there."

He hung up and put the code card in his rear pocket. It looked like a bank calendar with descriptions of very peculiar loan rates. He was to meet Smith at the Logan Airport shuttle room in Boston.

Chiun was in the Toyota. He was busy not writing his tale of the king's love. How could he be expected to compose beauty with Remo ramming dimes into a telephone?

"We're going to Boston," said Remo.

"That is the other side of your country."

"Right."

"How can I write when we go shifting from one side of this country to another?" asked Chiun.

On the flight to Boston, he mentioned seven times how a true artist could not write while travelling, how if he were not travelling he would have completed his novel by now, how this was the very best time to write and it might never come again. If it weren't for this trip and its chaos, he would have done the book. Now it was over forever. Because of Remo.

Not that Chiun was in the habit of blaming, he mentioned. He just wanted things understood. He was not blaming Remo but Remo might just as well have set fire to Chiun's manuscript, a manuscript that probably was superior to William Shakespeare's, a famous white writer. Chiun mentioned famous white writers because if he mentioned Hak Lo, Remo would ask who Hak Lo was.

Remo wasn't asking who Hak Lo was. A man with a big grin, a checkered suit, and a gold keychain adorning his expanse of suede vest, apologized for listening into someone else's conversation but could the fine gentleman in the kimono possibly tell him who Hak Lo was? He was interested and did not know.

Remo put the man's unfinished luncheon compote, served in plastic dishes by the stewardesses, into the man's grinning face. Not hard. But the plastic bowl did crack.

It was not asked again on the flight across the continent who Hak Lo was.

Remo remained happily unknowing.

At Logan Airport in Boston, Chiun quoted a few lines from Hak Lo:

"Oh, torpid blossom

That meanders through thine unctuous morning,

Let thy perambulant breezes cusp,

Like the dalliance of a last-breathed life."

"That," Chiun said proudly, "is Hak Loian."

"That is icky mess," said Remo.

"You are a barbarian," said Chiun. His voice was high and squeaky, angrier than normal.

"Because I don't like what I don't like. I don't care if you think America is such a new backward country. My opinion is as good as anyone else's. Anyone's. Especially yours. You're just an assassin like me. You're no better."

"Just an assassin?" asked Chiun, overwhelming horror seizing him. He stopped. The fold of the light blue kimono fluttered like a tree being hit by one sudden gust of breeze. They were at the entrance to the shuttle terminal of Logan Airport.

"Just an assassin?" Chiun shrieked in English. "More than a decade of the millennia of wisdom, poured into an unworthy white vessel, a stupid white vessel that calls an assassin just an assassin. There are just poets and there are just kings and there are just wealthy men. There are never just assassins."

"Just," said Remo.

People in their rush to catch their hourly flights to New York City stopped to look. Chiun's arms waved and the grace of the kimono flowed like a flag in a wind tunnel.

Remo, whose casual balance and strong face tended to weaken most women, often with desires they had not known they had, looked even sharper and turned like a cat toward Chiun.

And there they argued.

Dr. Harold W. Smith, whose public identity was as the director of Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for the organization and home of its massive computer banks, looked over his neatly folded New York Times at the two men fighting, one his lone killer arm, the other his Oriental trainer, and regretted meeting in a public place.

So secret was the organization only one man, Remo, was allowed to kill and only Smith, each American president and Remo himself knew exactly what the organization did. More often than not, the organization would pass up a necessary mission because of fear of exposure. Secrecy was more important for CURE than for the CIA because the CIA was constitutionally licensed to operate. But CURE had been set up in violation of the Constitution to do things.

And now, with terror as deep as the marrow of his bones, Smith watched his killer arm loudly talking about assassins. And just in case anyone should not be interested, there was Chiun, the Master of Sinanju and the most recent descendant of a line of more than 2,000 years of master assassins, in Oriental garb, screaming, his parchment face red. Screaming about assassins. Smith wanted to crawl into the pages of his New York Times and disappear.

A highly rational man, he understood that most people would not comprehend that the two were really killers. And they had ways of getting through people and official forces that was miraculous.

The danger now was that Smith would be seen talking to Remo. He would have to abort this mission.

He folded his newspaper and blended himself into the line of passengers headed toward New York. He turned his head away from the arguing pair who had not seen him. He looked out at the airport runways beneath this circular terminal for the shuttle flights. He became quite interested in the smog over Boston.

He was almost at the ramp to the plane when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Remo.