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Remo ignored the insult. He glanced at the windows and noticed the very small sensing devices that would set off alarms. The glass was thick enough to bounce back a howitzer shell. The air conditioning did not bring in outside air, which might be poisoned, but recirculated the old air with infusions of oxygen, and other elements removed.

It looked safe enough. A black cat with white paws purred contentedly next to a small heater in the corner.

"That's my best friend," Ravits said. "Cats are wonderful pets. They leave you alone." Ravits smiled once as if imitating an expression he once saw in a photograph and went back to his computer readout.

"Is there a phone in here?" Remo asked.

"There should be. I guess so. I don't use it. Nobody I want to call. Do you always talk so much?"

"We're etymologists," said Chiun, folding his long fingernails into his kimono. He pronounced the syllables of the word very slowly.'

"Then what are you doing here?" said Ravits. "Etymology is the study of words."

"The other one," Remo said. "Entomologists?" Ravits asked. "Right," said Remo. "That."

"Makes sense. That's why you're with me," Ravits said and put his soul back into the reproductive habits of the Ung beetle.

Remo found the telephone in the corner. He dialed the number Smith had given him. It didn't work. He often got the code numbers wrong, but this one Smith had written down.

He dialed again but it still didn't answer. He would have to go outside to telephone. Ravits did not know where the nearest outside phone was. The smell from his body reeked through the small lab.

"You stay here and I'll check in with Smitty," Remo told Chiun.

"I will stand on the outside of the door where the air is better," Chiun said.

"Remo found a working phone in the lab office next to Ravits'. Chiun waited outside by the only entrance and everything else was sealed. Ravits was safe. This telephone worked.

"Yes?" Smith's voice clicked.

"Just wanted to let you know that everything is fine." Remo said.

"Good."

"He's in a room with only one entrance and Chiun is standing there."

"Good," said Smith.

"We'll just wait for them to attack."

"Good," said Smith.

"How does Long Island Sound look?" Remo asked.

"I'm not at Folcroft," Smith said.

"In the Islands?" Remo asked.

"St. Martin. The computer backup area," Smith said.

"Good. Enjoy the weather," Remo said. "Listen, Smitty, don't worry, all right?"

"All right," Smith said.

Remo hung up the telephone and walked out to the fluorescent-lit hallway, so welded with steel that it looked like the inside of a submarine.

"We'll just wait," Remo told Chiun. He felt good about having been able to reassure Smith.

"Not inside," Chiun said. "I will not wait in there."

"Inside," said Remo.

"You wait inside," Chiun said. "I will wait here." Remo opened the door to the lab. The computer printout that Ravits had been poring over was now red and glistening. A pile of what looked like butcher's garbage rested on the paper. A pale shard of pinkish skin caught Remo's eye. The skin had acne.

The pile was what was left of Dr. Ravits.

Chapter 4

The problem was solved.

Finally, after years of ad hoc plugging of ad hoc gaps, the security problems with CURE's computers were solved.

Dr. Harold W. Smith walked out onto the white sandy beach of the perfect Caribbean bay of Grand Case on the French side of the Antilles island of St. Martin. He would get some sun. He had done a good job.

He felt that if he died now, in his last moment he could look back on his life and say he had done a good job for his country and even for the human race.

He had been pleased by Remo's phone call, too. Smith had been worried because it had been a risk to lift the FBI protection that had been working so well, but it would have been a greater risk to leave it the way it was.

Nobody could have blamed him if he had ignored the danger and left things along. But it was precisely because he had never tried to enhance his career that he had been chosen, many years ago, by a now-dead President, to run the new organization to fight America's enemies.

No, Smith thought, he had only done what he had to do. The real courage had been shown by the President. Smith had asked for an urgent meeting. Because of the nature of CURE, the meeting had to be kept secret even from the President's staff, and that could be sticky. The problem, even with trusted staff members, was that the more trusted they were, the more they felt they had to know everything. And that was how information got leaked, by too many people knowing it. Smith explained that they had to meet away from the President's staff.

"How?" the President asked. "Do I send them away?"

"No, Mr. President," Smith had said. "You leave them at the center of things. You see, their interest goes up when they feel left out of things. So you go on vacation, sir. Go to your ranch in California and then talk to the new assistant gardener."

"You want me to have you put on the ranch payroll?"

"I want you to have no contact with me, sir."

"You can't get on the ranch payroll without being checked out," the President said, then paused. "Oh, I forgot. You control some of the people who do the checking out, don't you?"

Harold Smith did not answer that. He did not control the people who investigated the information on his employment application; he controlled the information itself. Everything worked on computers, and CURE had been using them even before the Defense Department. CURE had always been ahead of the rest of the world, which was how it had been able to function with so few knowing of its existence. And a computer had no compulsion to share information with a best friend.

CURE lived and died by these computers. It took only a simple pushing of a few keys to give Harold W. Smith his clearance to be an assistant gardener at the President's California ranch, after first telling the ranch's head gardener that he needed an assistant.

So when the President flew to California for a brief rest, the first thing he did was examine the rosebushes along the stockade-style fence.

An elderly gardener was clipping around the thorns. The President sidled over to him and for all the world looked as if he were discussing rosebushes with him because every once in a while the gardener would gesticulate with his pruning shears. But the conversation went like this:

"Mr. President, I am going to ask you to take a risk that on its face might not seem logical."

"Go ahead. Try me," the President said with his usual good humor.

"You're familiar with the International Health, Agricultural and Educational Organization?"

"Sure. The thing with four thousand overpaid people who make a profession out of attacking America with America's money."

"I'm talking about their entomology labs."

"The one part of the whole shebang that works. And someone is trying to kill them. I've seen the reports and I've got the FBI protecting the lab. They're doing it well, too. Even the KGB couldn't handle it."

"I'm asking you to call off the FBI and let us take care of it."

"Why?"

"Because sooner or later, the FBI won't be able to protect them," Smith said, and explained the dangers that the labs were fighting. The only real defense would be to get at the people who were killing the scientists. The FBI couldn't do that and, no matter how good the defense, eventually the labs would be penetrated.

The President looked puzzled. "Why can't we leave the FBI where it is and just go after the crazies, whoever they are?"

"Because then they'll delay attacking. But it'll still happen eventually and we have to prevent that," Smith said.

"Are you going to use those people?" the President asked, referring to the two men who seemed to be able to penetrate anything at will, including the White House. He had seen them operate once and immediately wanted to know if America could get more of them. He had looked sad when Smith said there were only two in the world like that.