Warren Murphy: Oil Slick

"Remo Goldberg."

"There, Chiun," said Remo folding the note neatly. "Deliver that."

"I will. I will put it in no one's hands but Baraka's."

"You can try," said Remo grudgingly.

"Ahhh, no. You try. I do. That is the difference between being the Master of Sinanju and being ..."

"... a pale piece of pig's ear," Remo wearily concluded the sentence.

"Correct," said Chiun.

Minutes later, Chiun left the hotel room. Remo walked downstairs with him because the room was driving him stir crazy and he decided that better than sitting in the room would be sitting in one of the lobby's two chairs, because while the lobby was as ugly as the room, it was bigger. The other lobby chair was filled with the ample, suety, sweating bulk of Clayton Clogg. Clogg saw Remo ease into the chair next to him, and he nodded, as slightly as was possible, to acknowledge Remo's existence.

Remo watched Clogg sweat. So that was Smith's idea of the man behind the killings of the American scientists. Of course, Remo knew what Smith didn't-that Nuihc had masterminded the killings. But had he used Clogg as an instrument? Or Baraka?

"When are you going to make an offer for my oil substitute?"

"Why would I be interested," said Clogg, looking up from a week-old Times, his porcine nostrils quivering as if they had just been jammed full of bad smell.

"You don't seem to understand, Clogg. In six months, plants can be busy turning out my substitute, probably as much as 10 percent of the total oil needs of the country. In a year, it'll be 50 percent. Give me eighteen months, and we'll have the technology for towns to build oil-making plants of their own. It'll solve the solid waste problem. No more cities buying gas for their fleets of cars from the oil companies. They'll make their own. And Oxonoco will be looking down the barrel of a gun. A gun loaded with garbage. You'll be lucky to keep a fried chicken franchise."

Clogg watched Remo shrewdly. His nostrils flared.

"You are serious, aren't you, Mr....er, Goldberg?"

"Of course, I'm serious. I've spent the best years of my life working on this project."

"I just don't seem ever to have heard of you in the area of oil research," Clogg said.

"I've been in affiliated fields," said Remo. "The oil discovery was just a happy accident. Actually, I've been dealing in garbage for the last ten years."

"Where have you worked?"

Remo had known the question would be coming. Smoothly, he answered "Universal Wasting," giving the name of a company that he knew CURE manipulated. He saw Clogg make a mental note of it.

"If you had such a thing, Mr. Goldberg, we might well be interested in making you an offer."

"Straight cash or a percentage of sales?" asked Remo.

"I don't think you'd find a percentage of sales very profitable," Clogg said greasily.

"Why's that?"

"Obviously we could not put such a new development into the market before it had been fully tested. It might be years before it could meet our rigorous standards of quality."

"In other words," said Remo, "it would be buried and forgotten. Like the carburetor that can triple a car's gas mileage."

"That carburetor is a myth. There is no such thing."

"How much cash for an oil substitute?" asked Remo.

"The concept is so unique that a price in six figures might not be out of range. Of course, that's probably not so much when you share it with your fellow researchers."

"No way," said Remo. "There are no fellow researchers and the whole thing is filed up here." He tapped his head. "I wouldn't trust anybody else with my secret."

"That is intelligent of you. There are unscrupulous people in this world."

"That there are."

"Universal Wasting, you say."

"That's right."

Then Clogg was silent again. Remo soon tired of looking up his nostrils and retreated back to his room for his afternoon phone call.

He asked Smith to phony up a cover story for one Remo Goldberg, finally admitting that he was one and the same.

"I wish you had told me yesterday," Smith sniffed.

"Why?"

"Because I wasted a lot of time and money trying to track down an oil researcher named Goldberg."

"I can't do anything about the time, but you can take the money out of Chiun's next gold shipment to Sinanju."

"Be sure to tell him it was your idea," said Smith, in what Remo could swear was his first attempt at humor. Ever.

"One other thing," said Remo. "I don't know anything about international politics, but it might be a good idea if King Adras were ready in the wings, waiting to return to his throne."

"Why?" asked Smith excitedly. "Has something happened to Baraka? Is there... ?"

"No," Remo interrupted. "But he might get something in the mail that doesn't sit well."

However such concern about Chiun was unnecessary, Chiun himself told Remo that afternoon.

There had been nothing complicated about it, he told Remo. He had simply gone to the front door of the palace, explained who he was, and in no time at all had been ushered in to see Colonel Baraka. Colonel Baraka had been kind and polite and had treated Chiun with the utmost respect and deference.

"Did he promise to abdicate?"

"He asked for time to consider the prospect. Of course, I granted him an extension until the weekend."

"And you had no trouble getting in to see him?"

"None at all. Why should I? And I delivered your worthless letter, too."

And Chiun stuck to this story, even later when, on the radio which passed for entertainment in Lobynia, there were frenzied news accounts of chaos and violence at the presidential palace. Apparently a group of Orientals, as many as one hundred in number, had assaulted the palace in broad daylight, disabling twenty-seven soldiers. They had been foiled in their attempt to kill Colonel Baraka by his undaunted courage in facing down his attackers.

"Hear that?" Remo asked Chiun.

"Yes. I wish I had been there to see it. It sounds very exciting."

"That's all you've got to say?"

"What else is there?"

Remo bowed in the face of inexorable logic and let the subject drop.

It was still in the mind of Colonel Baraka, however. Nothing else had been in his mind since the aged Oriental had demolished the palace guard and torn open Baraka's bolted door as if it had been made of paper.

His hand still shook when he thought of the diminutive old man who presented him with written demands. He counted himself lucky to have escaped with his life. As soon as he was sure the old man had left, he brought both letters to Nuihc's room.

"They've invaded my palace. What can I do?"

"You can stop chattering as a child," Nuihc said. "Forget the notes. The time has almost come for me to deal with these two."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Third World International Youth Conference opened bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and noisy at 9:00 A.M. the next morning. Three hundred and fifty delegates from all over the world assembled in the Revolutionary Triumph Building to condemn the United States and Israel for murder and savagery, of which they were not guilty, and to praise the Arabs for murder and savagery, of which they were guilty, but which were now labeled heroism and daring.

That was at 9:00 A.M.

At 9:30 A.M., there had been a half-dozen fistfights. Oriental youths, mainly from Japan, wanted to criticize only the Israelis, thus, they thought, scoring points with the oil-supplying Arabs. However, the American delegation would have none of it. They demanded that not only Israelis but all whites be condemned for the basic, cardinal, unforgivable sin of not being something else other than white.

This provoked the black African delegates to a state of rage, since, misunderstanding the resolution on the floor, they thought it was one of praise and demanded to be included, too. Implicit in their demand was the threat that if their threat was not heeded, they would eat the white delegates, one at a time.