Warren Murphy: Judgment Day

The difference was that usually only Dr. Smith knew the real purposes of Folcroft Sanitarium. But now, a different man knew. Blake Corbish went to Smith's office. The secretary told him Dr. Smith was not in this morning and she did not have an appointment for a Mr. Corbish.

"In the back of your top left drawer is an envelope with instructions for you," said Corbish. Smith had given him the procedure for the change of CURE's directors, but it had been given out when Smith was delirious and Corbish was not really sure it was accurate. Still, if it should fail, he had a secondary plan that involved access to the computer complex.

But it wasn't necessary. He felt a pleasant sense of assured success when indeed there was an envelope in the back of the top left drawer. The envelope was sealed with wax. It had dust on it.

"You know, when I first came here, I wondered what was in this envelope. And Dr. Smith said that one day I would be told to open it. Well, at first I was curious, but then I forgot about it. So many peculiar ways he has."

Inside the envelope was a typewritten sheet; Corbish could tell that it had been written with one of the earliest IDC typewriters from the old typeface and the heavy impression.

The secretary pursed her lips.

"I see," she said. "Well, let's see. There's one of four things I'm supposed to ask you to do. I'll give you a choice. Get me my own tax return or my father's for any year I name, or the weather of China, France, and Russia, or…"

Corbish used the secretary's phone for the weather. He did not even let her finish the list. He put the receiver to her ear, she nodded, and he hung up.

"Well, I hope you'll enjoy your stay at Folcroft, sir. Is Dr. Smith all right?"

Corbish could see the honest concern in her face. She might make a good secretary.

"He's fine."

"Good. I'm so glad. When he didn't show up for three days, I was worried, but his wife didn't even seem to bat an eye. Well, I'll tell you, three days for Dr. Smith to be out of this office is very unusual. Very unusual. But then, he has his own way of doing things. A strange, man, if you know what I mean, but a fine man. A decent man. A good man."

As Corbish entered his new office with the one-way mirrors that looked out to the Long Island Sound, he made a note to himself that he would have to get rid of this talky old biddy. Loyalty was one thing. Yakety yak was another. An IDC subsidiary, such as Folcroft had just become, did not allow yakety yak.

CHAPTER FOUR

A match? Why didn't he use a bomb? A tornado? A flood? An earthquake?

Why hadn't Remo used a car or an electric toaster or a plastic neon-coated sign?

"But Little Father," complained Remo, "there is no such thing as a plastic neon-coated sign." He stood on the balcony of the Fontainebleu Hotel in Miami Beach, the salty breeze from the Atlantic blowing hot and muggy at his back, the wisp of an Oriental—Chiun, the Master of Sinanju exhorting heatedly at his front Chiun's gracious flowing kimono was wrapped around his knees and came off his back like a yellow and red flag at rest. His thin white hair barely touched the neck of the gown. His back was to Remo.

He had just said, "One should not be forced to gaze constantly upon the wasted years of one's life." The "wasted years" he referred to was the time devoted to training Remo as the one and only assassin for CURE. Chiun had also muttered something in Korean, so quickly the words ran together, but Remo recognized it. It was the usual comment that even the Master of Sinanju was unable to transform mud into diamonds.

"There's no such thing as a plastic neon-coated sign," insisted Remo.

"I know, or you would have used it," said Chiun.

"I didn't have time."

"A fool is always in a hurry."

"I had several assignments that night."

"That is because you do not know how to deal with an emperor. You do not understand an emperor. You do not wish to understand an emperor. You wish to set fire to things. You wish to burn down things. Little children like to set fires to things, too. They like to see the pretty flames."

"But wasn't it you, Little Father, who told me that the secret of Sinanju was that it was beyond play-dancing, that it used everything?"

"Everything properly. Setting fire to property is not proper. Any fool can burn down a palace. Any fool can reap carnage upon a land. Any army can do that. If an emperor wants an assassin—" Churn's voice quivered as if he were a priest referring to the original Twelve Apostles, his voice implying that one could find a fisherman or a tax collector anywhere, but an assassin, ah, that was someone special "—he seeks an assassin."

"I did what I had to do and I was glad I did it," said Remo angrily. "Fucking glad, if you want to know."

"Obscenity is the first sign of a man out of control," said Chiun.

"I heard you use obscenity once," Remo replied. "As a matter of fact, you use it very often. What do you call 'a pale piece of a pig's ear'?"

"You," said Chiun, who thought this response so humorous that he repeated the question and answer several times to his pupil, whose white man's sense of humor could not appreciate a joke of such subtlety.

"What do you call a pale piece of a pig's ear? You," said Chiun.

"I heard, I heard, I heard," said Remo. He headed for the door to the suite. They had been here four days and for four days he had endured this criticism and ridicule. During morning training, Chiun had asked Remo why he bothered to train when for a penny Remo could buy matches or for dollars a gun. Better yet, why didn't Remo get himself a bomb and drop it hither and yon? Preferably hither because if he aimed hither it would land yon. Like a disease, sloppiness led to more sloppiness, Chiun said.

Remo went out into the hot Miami day. He had long ago purged himself of his appetite for pizza, fatty corned beef, fried shrimp, and Chinese food loaded with monosodium glutamate. But sometimes when it was hot and a bar looked dark, damp and inviting, he thought wistfully of what it would be like to just walk in and order a foamy golden brew like anyone else. Just like anyone else. Which he wasn't.

He did not know when he had become different. He could not point to a day, or even a month or year. There was a time when he realized that after day after day of Chiun's training, guidance, prodding, and probing, his entire life was filled with hating the discipline while trying to achieve it and there came that one moment when he realized he could never go back to what he had been.. That he was someone else. And he had felt very frightened and very alone even though he could have, if he had wished, laid waste to every person he had seen that day, excepting Chiun himself, of course.

He felt as a newborn child must feel, but there were no arms to hold him and give him warmth and stroking; there was only his discipline and the need to learn. He had not volunteered to learn. He had been hijacked into CURE by a man who had framed him for murder. And he had learned and learned and now he had a new life, and whether he liked it or not, it was his whole life.

As Chiun had said, "One does not ask for life. But it is all you have and you must live it and honor it and at the right time surrender it with the dignity and grace befitting the best that is in you."

And Remo had answered, "But Little Father, I thought all your training was so that I would not have to surrender my life."

"We all surrender life. It is the time and manner I hope to teach you. The fool sprinkles his life away like confetti upon the ground, a sacrifice to the passion of the moment. When your life goes, the very bowels of the earth will shake."

"And when your life goes?" Remo had asked.

"I had not thought of that yet. It is very far away. I am only in my eighth decade. But the way your training is progressing, I would think of it every day if I were you."