Warren Murphy: Holy Terror

"You're off limits," said Remo. "This is our thing. You don't understand it, and you don't have any business in it." Remo picked up a pebble and at 20 yards split a cactus at its base.

"Well, unless you apologize, all of us are going nowhere," said Smith.

"Then we're going nowhere," said Remo.

"Unlike you two, I happen to need water and shelter and food at reasonable intervals. Besides, I don't have a week to wait in a New Mexican river bed."

"With all your computers back at Folcroft, you don't need to know what we're all doing out here?"

"From what I gathered from Chiun, you're here because you changed some baseball rules on him and got another white to side with you. I gather he might be willing to forget this if a proper apology were offered. Something to do with tokens."

"Feed this into your computer. The last time Chiun wanted a token, it turned out to be Barbara Streisand. You ready for that?"

Smith cleared his throat. "Go tell him you're sorry so we can get on with the matter at hand. There's work to do. Important work."

Remo shrugged. He found Chiun where the Master had been sitting, his legs folded under him, his arms at rest on his lap, the dry desert breeze playing with his wisp of beard. Remo spoke to him only briefly and returned to Smith.

"Get this. The token he wants to mend his hurt is fourteen fatted cows, a prize bull, flocks of ducks, geese and chickens in the hundreds, bolts of silk the length of castle walls, or Folcroft's walls since he still thinks of the sanitarium cover as a castle, ten handmaidens and a hundred carts of our finest brown rice."

"What's that?" said Smith, unbelieving.

"He wants to bring it home to Sinanju with him. That was your mistake, telling him last week he could visit his village. Now he wants to bring home something to show that his time in the West hasn't been wasted."

"I already told him you've got to go in by submarine. That's how the gold is delivered to his village. I think it's enough. You know we're supposed to be a secret organization, not a circus. Tell him providing transportation to take him home is enough."

Remo shrugged again, and again returned to Chiun, and again returned with an answer. "He says you're a racist too."

"Tell him we just can't make the delivery of all that stuff, not until we establish diplomatic relations with North Korea. Tell him we'll give him a ruby the size of a robin's egg."

Chiun's response through Remo was that every Master of Sinanju who had ever ventured across the seas before had returned to Sinanju with tributes to his glory. All except the one who was unfortunate enough to work for racists.

"Two rubies," said Smith.

And when it was agreed under the hot New Mexico sun that the tribute to Chiun would be two rubies, a diamond half their size, and a color television set, Smith was informed that the good thing about Americans was their ability to see the flaws in their character and to attempt to amend them.

In the car Smith outlined the problem. CURE, the organization he headed and for which Remo and Chiun worked, had lost four agents checking out the Divine Bliss Mission, Inc. While the criminal potential for the DBM, Inc., was minimal, just another money hustle, its implications worried Smith. Thousands of religious fanatics loosed upon a country and directed by—there was no other word for it—a hustler.

Chum, in the back seat, thought this was horrible.

"There is nothing worse than a hustler," said Chiun. "Woe be to the land to which a hustler comes, for the fields will lie fallow and the young maidens will abandon their chores for the flimsiness of his words."

"We thought that you, with your knowledge of the East, would be especially valuable in this, beyond just your training of Remo," said Smith, checking his rear-view mirror. Remo had early observed how Smith drove; every ten seconds he looked in the rearview mirror and for every five looks in the rearview mirror, there was a glance in the outside mirror. He drove this way on a highway or in a driveway, a routine, controlled discipline that never varied. The dead president who had started CURE had picked the right man for the job, a man of stern self-control, a man whose ambition would never drive him to use the organization to control a country, a man incapable of ambition because ambition implied imagination, and Remo was sure that the last fantasy that had ever entered Smith's crusty New England mind was goblins in the closet and would Mommy turn on the light so they would go away.

"Sinanju is here to serve in truth and honesty," said Chiun, and Remo looked out the window, nauseated.

"Which is why I told Remo we would provide you with a trip home as a bonus for the wonderful job you've done with him."

"It has not been easy, considering the condition of the material," said Chiun.

"We knew that, Master of Sinanju," said Smith.

"Speaking of hustlers," said Remo, "what size rubies are you getting, Chiun?"

"There is a difference between accepting tribute and hustling, but I would not expect a racist to understand that. Emperor Smith, who is not a racist, understands this. He understands the meaning of tribute so well that to enhance his position in the grateful village of Sinanju, he may make the tribute three rubies and a diamond, instead of two rubies and a diamond, which is what the Chinese would probably pay. Such is the decency, Remo, of the most honorable Harold W. Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium—a man more fit to rule than your president and a man who need but say the word and this injustice of rule could be amended."

Smith cleared his throat while Remo chuckled.

"Getting down to business," Smith said, "we've been lucky. Somehow one of the Divine Bliss converts has defected. He was in Patna and was sent back to help work out what the Blissful Master's followers call some kind of big thing. The man had been elevated to, I think they call it, arch-priest. We're not certain. As you know, our organization works without people knowing what they're doing."

"Right through the top, Smitty."

"I was about to say, except for you and me. Chiun, as you know, thinks I'm an emperor."

"Or a mark," said Remo.

"A fine emperor," said Chiun. "One whose generosity marks him for eternal fame."

"One of the people who provides us with information, without knowing it, works in the newspaper business on the coast and somebody told him of something big, very big about to happen in America, and that only someone as shrewd as the Blissful Master could pull it off. The biggest ever, he said."

"The biggest what?" asked Remo.

"That's what we don't know. We do know that with an army of religious fanatics, it could be almost anything. Which is why we set the meeting at the Rhoda Motel. This Divine Bliss thing, it has so many people around that I didn't trust any of the usual channels. So I set up the meeting for here. Frankly I was a little worried when I saw you in that ditch waiting for me. The Blissful Master had one of his followers, a sheriff, put out a warrant for the defector. Three states. Poor devil was in hiding. We arranged to hide him near you, so you could question him. I'm sure your questioning techniques can get anything."

"The defector? His name Clete?" asked Remo.

"That's his hiding name."

"His girlfriend's name Loretta?"

"Yes, yes. Correct."

"He a big guy? Six-feet-four in bare feet?"

"Yes. You've met him?"

"He wear a Stetson?"

"Yes. That's him."

"Did he have a dish in his mouth and through the spinal column in the back?"

"No. Of course not."

"He does now," said Remo.

Chiun looked upon the blue heavens of New Mexico and the plains beyond. In the racist white man's country, who knew what they would accuse a poor Korean of next?